Judgment as an Element in Luck
Judgment has been called the eye of the mind. When people demonstrate bad judgment it is usually due less to defects in thinking than to emotional factors that have clouded the mind’s outlook.
An appalling amount of bad luck can be attributed to three emotional states: boredom, anxiety, and over-confidence. Use these principles to your benefit: 1) Beware of boredom. 2) Allow for anxiety. 3) Overcome overconfidence. These rules are important markers on the road to better luck.
When a person is bored he hungers for an event that will lead to a better life. He looks with favor upon anything that seems to promise a thrill. This makes him highly vulnerable to bad luck because he does not assess the risks of the chances that he takes. Boredom has pushed many people into tragic misfortune.
Similarly in forming our judgment of chances, we must allow for inevitable and natural anxiety. Anxiety can cause us to reject favorable chances, even when they come straight at us, by making us think that we that we see peril and risk where there is none. In order to be lucky, we are not required to give up anxiety (some of which is healthy); but we must make allowances for the appearance of anxiety, and bring our fears to the surface for appropriate judgment.
In some ways, the more important rule for protecting our judgment from unstable emotions is the need to “overcome overconfidence.” A dangerous sense of over-confidence can result from: 1) a run of luck, 2) a lack of experience, and 3) a misunderstanding of motive.
We sometimes believe that we understand people’s motives when we actually do not. Too many of us accept, at face value, the motives put forward by people with whom we must deal in chance situations. Not that we need to be cynical about the motives of other people. Cynicism is, in truth, only an inverted form of naiveté, twisting one’s view of reality. At the same time, when we have no sound reason to believe in the other person’s purity of motive, we do well to pause for reflection.