The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist

75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common

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“How to Get Lucky”

A sermon by Rev. John Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, May 8, 2005

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

 

 

It’s been a stressful week.  Due to a death in her family, our nearly indispensable parish administrator Joan was out much of the week.  Both Sylvia and I had challenging memorial services.  Sylvia was here yesterday to conduct the service for a 35-week old stillborn child (Sylvia has done extraordinary ministry) and, in the afternoon, I officiated at a wonderful wedding.  And – it matters nearly not at all – but I’ve had this dermatological thing going on where, in order to prevent skin cancer, my doctor intentionally burned my face such that I looked like I’d been caught looking at a nuclear explosion and then my face swelled and glowed and dried and peeled…and I am and will be OK but, as I say, it’s been a stressful week.  And perhaps it’s been a stressful week in your life also.

 

And today is Mother’s Day.  And, given the wide range of reactions to Mother’s Day, what does one say?  And so, I’ll confess to having found something that I wrote some time ago but, to my knowledge, I’ve never preached here…and so the topic of this sermon – much adapted – is “How to Get Lucky.”

 

Mother’s Day is an occasion for all of us to give thanks for our great stroke of luck at being here – being alive – at all.

 

There’s an old Pogo comic strip in which the characters Churchy Lafemme and Porky are floating in a rowboat.  Churchy reads a newspaper headline that screams, ‘SUN TO BURN OUT IN TWO MILLION YEARS EXTINGUISHING ALL LIFE.”  “Woe is me,” cries Churchy, “I am too young to die.”  This evokes a response from the other end of the rowboat.  “Aw, shaddup,” says Porky.  “You’re lucky to be here in the first place.”

 

It seems to me that Mother’s Day is an opportunity for us to reflect on the role of luck in our lives: all of us are lucky to be here in the first place. 

 

But what is luck?  By definition luck consists of “those events which influence our lives but are not of our own making.”  Hence, we are skeptical about attempts to influence our luck.  Upon closer investigation, however, it seems that certain conditions do affect our luck; and an environment can be established to hinder or help our luck.  We acknowledge this intuitively when we notice that someone appears to attract bad luck or that someone else seems to get all the breaks. What I will talk about today, therefore, is the environment that gives rise to good or bad luck.

 

At the outset it should be said that the role of luck is generally downplayed or dismissed in the outcome of events.  Even though many things do happen purely by chance, we are averse to this admission.  We are taught by theology, philosophy and literature that we get what we deserve.  “Character is destiny,” wrote Heraclitus and we ascribe our successes to our intelligence and our failures to our flaws.  We live the illusion that we are in control of our destiny.

 

Through the life of evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayer I have this year been reintroduced to the concept of natural selection which is a random development – lucky or unlucky, who’s to say?  Nothing is assured.  Not justice, not progress, not peace nor freedom.  In the absence of human effort, all is left to chance.  Fundamentalists – determinists – will nonetheless resist the notion that luck is a factor in human change.

 

A president of the United States is not going to stand in front of the TV cameras and say, “Well, folks, I haven’t the slightest idea how it happened but we haven’t gotten into any wars and the unemployment rate is down.  I’m a lucky fella.”  You will never hear a stock market speculator credit luck for his or her earnings: rather, they will construct a fancy chain of reasoning to cleverly demonstrate their own perspicacity.  Likewise, therapists and counselors will seldom chalk up their patients’ problems to bad luck (their livelihood depends upon others believing that they have gotten what they deserve).  And yet many (not all) economic, political and personal situations are heavily influenced by luck.  When John F. Kennedy was asked how he became a war hero, he responded, “They sank my boat!” and we laugh because his unexpected candor rings truer than most war stories.

 

All of us tend to dismiss the importance of luck because luck is meaningless while we yearn for meaning.  The truth is, however, that life is often random and meaningless; and it is that uncomfortable fact that we must first look in the eye if we want to do something about our luck. 

 

For several months, I have been reading a variety of books about health, about business, about gambling and the stock market, and about luck itself.  From these I have culled seven techniques (7’s a lucky number of course)…7 techniques of lucky positioning…John Gibbons 7-Less-than-Ironclad Laws of Luck which – before I go on cable and offer them for $19.95 with a set of ginsu knives, I will make available to you today for the price of ten more minutes of your time.

 

The first technique is to make the distinction between those outcomes that are mostly dependent on luck and those dependent on planning or skill.  For any given goal it is helpful for us to have some idea of the relative significance of luck or skill. 

 

Skill and planning will largely determine the outcome of many simple tasks.  Cooking a meal, driving a car, or winning an athletic contest depend mostly upon ability – though power outages, drunken drivers, and muscle cramps may unpredictably intervene.  More complex tasks, however, usually involve a greater degree of luck.  Making friends, or money on the stock market, or getting or keeping a good job, choosing a mate or a career, raising healthy tomatoes or children…to varying degrees, one’s success is conditioned by one’s luck. 

 

When embarking on something, therefore, it is helpful to have a rough idea of the balance:  is it 50/50 luck to skill or is it more like 20% skill and 80% luck or vice versa?  Simply to have an awareness of the role of luck is characteristic of the lucky personality.  Knowing the importance of chance, we can become aware that a situation is bound to change.  It can change radically, rapidly and without warning, in unpredictable ways; but we can be certain it will change. 

 

The one thing we ought not expect is precisely what the loser expects: continuity and repetition.  The unlucky mental process goes like this:  A good result happens once or a few times; the loser studies it and ascribes it to planning and concludes that the same planning will produce the same result in the future.  And the loser loses again.  The lucky attitude is to acknowledge that I am where I am partly because of luck.  My luck can change.  It is lifting me up today and tomorrow it may drop me.  The lucky personality enters a situation heavily influenced by luck and deliberately strays light-footed, ready to jump this way or that as events unfold.  The lucky approach is to say to yourself: “I’m going to get into this risky situation (this relationship, this game, this job, this investment) but I am not operating under the delusion that planning will make it turn out my way.  I see luck looming large and so I will not grow too confident and relaxed.  I will expect rapid change.  I won’t make large irrevocable commitments.  I’ll stay poised to bail out the minute I see a change I don’t like.”  The first step in controlling your luck is to recognize it exists.

 

The second is to find the fast flow.  Nothing much happens to hermits, but if you’re the opposite of a hermit, things happen.  For the most part, lucky breaks flow through contacts with people; and it is possible to position oneself for a lucky break.  Studies made of acquaintanceship networks and their results are astounding.  An MIT study once established that the average American is in regular contact with as many as 300 people on a first-name basis (weak links with cashiers and people you see once a year at parties and the person who cuts your hair and so on and so on, as well as strong links with close friends and family).  Now if you suppose that each of them has an additional 300 weak and strong links, that means that your secondary links (friend-of-a-friend) total some 90 thousand people; and your tertiary links (friend-of-a friend-of-a-friend) number 27 million.  Now you may not think that you are in any meaningful contact with those 27 million but in fact luck flows along chains of people until it hits its targets.  What is key here is for other to know what it is you would consider a lucky break…whether that is a job you would like to have or someone you want to meet or something you want to buy or sell.   To get lucky, go where events flow fastest.  Make contact with people.  Get involved.  Don’t watch events from the sidelines but plunge into them yourself.

 

The third technique to get lucky is called “risk spooning.”  You see, there are two certain methods of becoming a loser: one is to take goofy risks, where the potential losses far exceed the rewards sought; and the other is to take no risks at all.  Lucky people avoid both extremes but cultivate the technique of taking risks in carefully measured spoonfuls.

 

Of the two extremes – goofy risks or no risks – it is far more common in our culture to take no risks – to value safety and security above everything.  Just think of the tortoise and the hare: we are taught to be like the tortoises, plodding steadily but surely to victory.  I will not deprecate the slow steady path, but it is not a particularly lucky one. 

 

I have a friend who once had a job writing obituaries for a local newspaper.  Eventually he quit because all the obits were the same: so-and-so went to work right after school, never stuck his neck out, made as few decisions as possible, innovated nothing; came to work promptly at opening time each morning, did precisely the work required, went home promptly at 5; and 35 years later collected a gold pen and pencil set and retired, never to be seen or heard from again.  In fact we are conditioned to such a plodding life: the Puritan ethic frowns on gambling; keep your nose to the grindstone, a bird in hand and all that.  All this tends to minimize the role of luck, bad as well as good.  But if you want good things to happen and your life to change, then you must be willing to accept an element of risk.

 

Here it is interesting to look at the lives of the fabulously lucky – lucky at least in financial terms.  John D. Rockefeller, when asked for advice, credited his success to thrift, patience, intelligence, and those work ethic virtues.  He handed out shiny new dimes and preached “work hard, spend wisely and invest safely.”  But is this how JD made it?  Not at all!  He was a wild speculator who had his share of good and bad luck until he chanced into an oil refinery in Cleveland that became the nucleus of Standard Oil.  And, as for the dime-giving charade, that was a public relations scheme invented for Rockefeller to change his image from that of a robber baron and thereby quell public criticism of his questionable business practices. His valet was instructed to regard the dimes as important as any article of clothing so that when he met small boys he could mumble about the work ethic and hide the truth:  that he was a risk taker who got lucky. 

 

Similar stories can be told of others, like Thomas John Watson, the dour ascetic IBM founder, whose famous slogan was “Work, Think, and Plan” and who posted signs to that effect in IBM offices.  His own history was nearly the opposite: he failed as a sewing machine salesman, failed in a grocery store business, finally got a steady job as a salesman with National Cash Register and then gambled it all away on a down-in-the-dumps operation called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co.  The rest, as they say, is history; and this was a man who never talked about luck.

 

Now much as I might like to generate a few tycoons in this congregation, these examples may seem a trifle foreign.  But take something more familiar like falling in love.  One will not fall in love unless one is willing to make an emotional commitment that has the capacity to wound.  Risk is a necessary ingredient in every successful life because risk puts you in position to win.  Parenting, mothering, fathering: what could be riskier?  Mothers Day is a perfect occasion to celebrate High Stakes Gambling!

 

The fourth of the 7 lucky commandments is called “run-cutting” and basically means don’t push your luck.  But this is more than vague advice: it’s statistically factual.  Think about the probabilities in tossing a coin: if you toss it 1,024 times, the odds are there will be one long run in which heads comes up nine times in a row.  But there will be 32 short runs in which heads comes up four times in a row.  If you assume, therefore, that any given run will be short you will almost always be right.  Our tendency, unfortunately, is just the opposite: Hoping for the long run we hang on too long.  It is better to be a moderate pessimist.  An example from the stock market is probably clearest: You’re sitting there with a handful of Gee Whiz stock which you bought at 10 dollars a share.  It jumps to 15, then to 20.  You’ve doubled your money.  You set your sights on a long run of luck.  But the bottom drops out of the thingamabob market and then price goes back to 15.  You call it a temporary dip and decide to hang on.  And it goes to 12.  But it continues to slide.  Now you’re furious, you feel cheated.  “I’ll be darned if I’ll let go of this now.  This stock owes me and I’ll hang on till it pays off.”  So it collapses to 5 dollars.  And that is how losers are made. 

 

Bernard Baruch, a very lucky man, cut a lot of runs by selling his stock in the middle of a thundering bull market in 1928.  He was out of the market by 1929, something a lot of people wish they could have said before October 19.  When asked the secret of his success, Baruch replied, “Not being greedy.”

 

Luck-selection is the 5th technique but really an extension of the 4th.  Whether your venture is an investment or a job or a love affair, you cannot know for sure how it will turn out.  If your luck is good, you stay with it.  But what if it turns sour?  The lucky reaction is to wait a while, see if the problems can be worked out or go away, but then – if the answer is no, to bail out.  Now I don’t want to encourage lines in front of the divorce courts tomorrow morning: the time to use this advice is long before marriage – but the truly lucky have the ability to select their own luck.

 

Hit with bad luck, they discard it and free themselves to do better in another venture.  The unlucky, on the other hand, get stuck: in bad relationships, losing money ventures, lousy jobs. They haven’t been dealt worse hands than anybody else – rather they are incapable of making the painful confession, ‘I was wrong’ and thus free themselves to seek better luck.  Once again, Bernard Baruch:  “You take risks going in and you take risks getting out.  It you were to insist on 100% certainty you would not be able to make any moves at all.”

 

A lot of people think that being religious has to do with being really certain – really confident - about stuff.  I don’t think so.  I think that being religious has more to do with taking chances on stuff we’re less than 100% confident of.  My colleague Forrest Church in New York talks about acting on our “60% convictions.”

 

Forrest believes that the world is made up of three different kinds of people. First are the absolutists. They are the ones who are 100% sure that they are right, whether it is about religion or science or raising kids.

 

The second group is what he calls the 40%ers. These are folks who have few firm beliefs and who are so afraid to take a stand they do nothing. Forrest describes them as the kind of people who are so fearful of spilling their water that they will let it evaporate from the cup.

 

The third group Forrest names the 60%ers. These folks have a 60% belief in the truth as they find it. They are not paralyzed like the 40%ers, nor do they grandstand like the 100%ers. These are the people who act knowing that they may be wrong. These are the people who accept that they don’t know it all. And because they are willing to doubt, they are more likely to consider the impact of their actions on others. They are willing to act, but are fully aware that there are consequences to their actions. As Forrest puts it, “intrinsically we recognize that we are all good and bad. Yet, we have to discriminate and make hard choices, knowing as we do that we might be wrong. But we take the risk nonetheless.”

 

60%ers are the people who can say with conviction, “I don’t know” even as they do the best they can with what they do know.  60%ers, I’d say, are the lucky ones. 

 

In one of the essays in the book I’ve recently recommended that we all read – Anne Lamott’s Plan B, which by the way is available for loan today – she speaks of the Church of Eighty Percent Sincerity.  “We in the Church of 80% Sincerity do not believe in miracles (a friend of hers says).  But we do believe that you have to stay alert, because good things happen.  When God opens the door, you’ve got to put your foot in.  Eighty percent sincerity is about as good as it’s going to get.  So is 80% compassion.  Eighty percent celibacy.  So twenty percent of the time, you just get to be yourself.”

 

Whatever the exact percentage, it’s less than 100: the essence of a well-lived life is risk.

 

Now the 6th of Gibbons Gambling Tips:  Luck doesn’t travel in straight lines, it follows a zigzag path.  This is the opposite of what we’re taught: the work ethic tells us to fix our eyes on our goals, looking neither to the left nor the right, refusing to be distracted.  It is a recipe for conformity, security, and the absence of luck.  Lucky men and women, in contrast, not only permit themselves to be distracted; they invite distraction.  Their lives are not straight paths but zigzags.  Old Harlan Sanders is a good example:  he bounced around like a ping-pong ball…dropped out of school in the 7th grade, worked at menial jobs, collected fares on a streetcar, piloted a ferryboat, sold insurance, then opened a restaurant.  Largely by luck, he stumbled onto a chicken recipe and a method for mass-producing fried chicken and a lot of grease has gone over the grill ever since.  If you put blinders on yourself so you see only straight ahead you will miss nearly everything.  And this is what the unlucky usually do: sticking to long-range plans, they box themselves into limited self-images: I couldn’t do that; I’m into the computer business.  I couldn’t do that, I’m a New Englander.  Become a croupier in Las Vegas?  Nonsense!  I’m a minister!

 

And thus we come to the 7th and last on the List of Luck: the role of religion.  Herein, contrary to my usual way, I am not promoting Unitarian Universalism.  In fact, it matters not a whit whether you are Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or a believer in the healing power of crystals.  Rational religion is no luckier than pure superstition; old-time religion is no unluckier than the most new-fangled nonsense.  What does affect your luck is whether you have some (any) kind of belief system that helps you make decisions when you are short on data and that keeps you from sitting around baffled and discouraged.  Religion is a tool that keeps you in the game – and you cannot get lucky unless you’re in the game.  (You’ll recall the story of the person who laments his never winning the lottery until he is reminded that, in order to win, he really does have to buy a ticket.)  Not that I want you to squander your earnings in the lottery, but it is a characteristic of lucky people that they have some belief system that keeps them in the game.

 

So there we have the Lucky Seven: 

 

So say the pundits of luck.  But there is time for a final story.  A research scientist once claimed that given enough time to itself behind an electric typewriter, a chimpanzee could eventually be lucky enough to hit all the right letters and produce a Shakespearean drama.  So with a roomful of chimps and IBM’s the scientist tested his theory.  Years went by when finally one chimp started shrieking in delight.  The scientist ripped the page from the typewriter and read excitedly: “To be or not to be.  That is the gehunstraflugl!”  So it is that today we too may get lucky.  But for certain there will be lots of gehunstraflugls to mar our perfection.  In the absence of perfection, therefore, we shall always be in need of one another’s kindness and forgiveness and acceptance. 

 

Happy Mother’s Day.  The truth is: we’re lucky to be here in the first place.