“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity” or some version of being able to make your own luck, is something you hear quite often. The idea is that if you adopt a certain mindset, live a certain lifestyle, or do certain things, then it becomes more likely that good or ‘lucky’ things will happen to you.
In the context of trying to understand how to make good decisions, I have always found this entirely unhelpful. It lacks explanatory power and is too vague an idea to usefully implement. I think this is because it doesn't account for cause and effect in a manner that makes sense to me.
To borrow language from Mariel Goddu’s fantastic article, humans have a superpower: we see and understand the world through cause and effect. We use this understanding of causality to change and control the world. We make things more or less likely, and it is this, the ability to conceive of probability distributions in relation to our actions, that is the real superpower.
To me, any useful theory of good decision-making process must have this superpower at its core.
And in this context, the only useful definition of luck is that which we cannot cause.
If you could have caused it... its not luck.
If you could not have caused it... it is luck.
Our superpower does not extend to luck. Luck is what we cannot control - the role that chance plays in outcomes. This is the only understanding of luck that is useful for developing decision-making skill.
So, no, you dont make your own luck. To be charitable, my rationalisation of what people really mean when they say they make their own luck is that: they have considered how things outside their control (true luck) might influence their outcomes and then acted in such a way that shifts the probability distribution towards their goals, reducing the risk of a bad outcome.
That just feels like luck.
