A college friend of mine is the luckiest person I know. It’s as if he has a four-leaf clover in his pocket every day of the week (remember that Futurama episode of Fry’s 4-leaf clover?). Here are three examples of why my friend Paul is the luckiest person I know.
- Once upon a time, Paul and I took a trip to Europe together during the summer. Before the school year ended, the local Peace Frogs store sponsored a “European Backpacking Trip” seminar for students and advertised the event by saying that they would be raffling off a First Class 2-month Eurail pass. Paul decided at the last minute that he would go to this seminar and check out the happenings for the both of us. He ended up winning the raffle for the Eurail pass in the popularly-attended seminar.
- Every year, the Engineering Student Council sponsors E-week (engineers-week) with games and food and prizes. One of the games featured an iPod as the first-place prize. I had class, so I told the guy I was dating at the time to go play the game and potentially win me an iPod. Paul somehow found out about this game and decided to also go for shits & giggles. Paul ended up winning the silly little game of chance and subsequently the iPod.
- Yesterday, Paul told me that he won another iPod, a silver nano. It was some kind of meeting for school, and he decided to go at the last minute. When he showed up, he realized that there was a raffle for an iPod nano, so he entered the raffle (I mean, why not?). Well, he won.
So my question is, how does one person get so lucky? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It’s not like a skill that you practice, like piano, whereby you can get better. It’s an intangible chance that shouldn’t differ from person to person. So how is it that my friend Paul has all the luck?
More importantly, what is the mechanism for this so that I can either learn from him, or take some of his luck?