One of the most often-cited quotes about luck comes from Louis Pasteur: chance favours the prepared mind. What people often forget, though, is that the full statement is quite different: "Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind." We tend to focus on that last part, the prepared mind. Work hard, prepare yourself, so that when chance appears, you will notice it. But that first part is equally crucial: if you're not observing well, observing closely to begin with, no amount of preparation is enough. The one is largely useless without the other. […] You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you're alert to them when they do. "Although we cannot deliberately evoke that will-o-the-wisp, chance, we can be on the alert for it, prepare ourselves to recognise it and profit by it when it comes," William Beveridge writes in The Art of Scientific Investigation. If we want to be successful, "we need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the look-out for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents." We can't control the variance. We can't control what happens. But we can control our attention and how we choose to deploy it.
Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff
