Do we make our own luck or does luck and the blind power of statistical necessity make us?
Carpe Diem: we are all battling an overwhelming statistical burden of entropy and psychological or cultural dissonance and difference in everything we do. Technically, anyone who succeeds does so “against the odds” – just to varying degrees of extremity. Statistically, success is very much more a matter of chance than we generally acknowledge. In the arts as much as elsewhere in the diversity of human affairs, talent or creative insight percolate to the top as a matter of exception, rather than as a rule. Probabilities may be weighted in favour of an individual who happens to find themselves in the right place at the right time, but there is no denying the irreducible tactical factor of luck in any9 creative enterprise. If opportunities do in fact (ever) occur for any of us, how we do (or don’t) exploit or capitalise on those circumstances when they arise will inevitably shape and define the course of our lives.
Daedelus Kite 