Lucky decisions

Most people make lots of decisions every day. Some are tougher to make than others and some are more consequential than others. One of those small everyday decisions recently made me think about the cost and how much we depend on luck to affirm that we did something right.

A story

Here is a little story that started my thought flow about decisions:

I take the train to work. It takes 35 minutes when it is on time. Yesterday, there was a signal failure somewhere between my departure and destination stations so the trains could not run. In my case, I had the following options:

  1. Skip work.
  2. Wait for the trains to start running.
  3. Take the car instead.

1. was not an option but how to decide between 2. and 3.? Taking the car would mean getting to work with only a small delay but it would cost extra highway tolls (The Öresund Bridge) and parking, a total of about $90. Waiting for the trains to start running would mean an unknown delay, potentially leading to lost work and thereby incurring an indirect cost, especially since I get paid by the hour and my hourly rate is slightly higher than the cost of driving.

If we ignore the much higher health risks involved with car driving compared to taking the train, the decision depended on how long I estimated the train delay would be. Since I had experienced signal failures before and they often take between two and three hours, I made an informed decision to take the car.

It turns out, it was a bad decision. The trains started running just when I had gotten half-way across the bridge. It felt bad to be wrong and it came with a small cost.

Luck

Decisions and luck are often tied together. In the story above, I highlighted the words “unknown” and “estimated” because a lot of the tougher decisions in life also have unknown factors and are based on estimates. And even though we make “informed decisions”, there are a lot of outside factors that we cannot control and that have an impact on the outcome of our decisions.

I consider these factors to be luck in both a good and bad sense, depending on the outcome. In the big picture of life, luck has a huge role to play but it is easily forgotten, ignored or overlooked.

For example, some successful people might say that their success is well-deserved and earned entirely by hard work and being smart but they forget to factor luck into the equation of their success. Bo Peabody (internet millionaire from the nineties) wrote a book about entrepreneurship and luck called Lucky or Smart? and I think the following quote sums up his points nicely:

Was I lucky? you bet your ass I was lucky. But I was also smart: smart enough to realize that I was getting lucky. — Bo Peabody

For me, the fact that I am even able to write this blog post shows how lucky I am. Sometimes, I even feel like my life is just a long series of lucky streaks. Realizing this helps me sympathize with people that have had much less luck in their lives. Poor life conditions are often not self-inflicted but the consequence of decisions that suffered from bad luck.

In the end, I think the best we can do is to try and acknowledge when we are actually being lucky and take advantage of those situations when they arise. But of course, that is easy to say for a lucky person like me.

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