Skill And Luck Quotes

He’s very pretty. For a human.” “He’s very broken,” said Magnus. “Like a lovely vase that someone has smashed. Only luck and skill can put it back together the way it was before.

and when love came to us twice and lied to us twice we decided to never love again that was fair fair to us and fair to love itself. we ask for no mercy or no miracles; we are strong enough to live and to die and to kill flies, attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack, live on luck and skill, get alone, get alone often, and if you can't sleep alone be careful of the words you speak in your sleep; and ask for no mercy no miracles; and don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.

There are rules to luck, not everything is chance for the wise; luck can be helped by skill.

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

You may have succeeded in shutting down the attack simulation, girl, but it was by luck alone, not skill. I would die of shock if you managed to do anything useful again for a long time" This is the Marcus that Tobias knows. The one who knows right where to hit to cause the most damage.

I'd always disparaged the games people played in pursuit of love--or the next hook up. The whole thing was a competition to see who could get how far, and I could never figure out if there was more luck or skill involved, or some unknowable combination of the two. People rarely said what they thought, or revealed how they felt. No one was honest.

You need luck to keep going. It takes more than skill to stay alive.

...Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.

It takes vast willpower, luck, and skill to be the first. But it takes a gigantic heart to be number two.

I made a list of skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. I wouldn't expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn't necessary. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas. I'll make a case for each one, but here's the preview list. Public speaking Psychology Business Writing Accounting Design (the basics) Conversation Overcoming Shyness Second language Golf Proper grammar Persuasion Technology ( hobby level) Proper voice technique

We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy. We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others. Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.

This is ten percent luck, Twenty percent skill, Fifteen percent power of will, Five percent pleasure, Fifty percent pain, and a hundred percent reason to remember the name.

In a duel, man to man, sword against sword, it can be a lack of skill that gets you killed. Often as not, though, it'll be a matter of luck, or if it goes on too long, then it'll be the man who tires first that tends to die. In the end it's about staying power. They should put that on headstones, "Got tired.

Luck is only my lover, not my wife," replied Bahktiaan easily. He drew his saber. "If ever I wed, it will be skill and intelligence." "Tedious bedfellows," said Sergi.

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely. But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory! I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory! Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

There's a quick and easy way to test whether an activity involves skill: ask whether you can lose on purpose.

Then again, she had-through a bizarre combination of skill, dumb luck and incredible misfortune-managed to build up a file any Debunker would envy.

Goals are for losers. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.

We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion which I have gradually come to accept by reading what other survivors have written, including myself, when I re-read my writings after a lapse of years. We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.

We were two girls who got lucky, and luck's not a skill that anyone can learn

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

The more stuff people owned, the unhappier and more stressed they tended to be. Conversely, the less stuff people owned and the more they spent on experiences like travel or learning new skills, the happier and more content they were.

It seems I have always been fortunate to be in a certain provident, which must be my sole skill, and worth, and luck. [p. 138]

Investing in luck squanders skill.

The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became: the participants grew increasingly less likely to switch to winning stocks, instead doubling down on losers or gravitating entirely toward bonds.

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake. Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ball-players—little as some of them may want to hear it—are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

... but in an attack, surviving is an accident. It doesn't take skill to stand in a place where no bullets find you, or to fire into the dark and hit a man you didn't see. It is all luck, or providence, depending on what you believe.

I did not know how to deal with this sort of death, the one that comes slow and inevitable and does not let go. I am a solider, I deal in cannonballs and rifle shots. I understand how a wound can fester and kill a soldier, but there is still the initial wound, something that can be avoided with a little skill and a great deal of luck. Death that simply comes and settles is not a thing I had any experience with.

Luck is often just skill expressing itself without the brain’s consent.

It’s human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.

Deliberate practice works when skill dominates, while a focus on process and probability is appropriate when luck is the greater force.

Because I’m what happens when luck meets skill,” Seth said, “and they get into a serious relationship.

Once an innovation reaches a certain level of popularity, its success is virtually assured. By the same token, great innovations can fail because the domino effect doesn't kick in.15

It all just depends. Some say on skill. Some say on will. Some say on luck. Some say on buck. Some say on race. Some say on face. Some say on Sunday God got a mighty, might plan. Nobody really knows what i depends on, but everybody knows it depends.

When luck plays a part in determining the consequences of your actions, you don't want to study success to learn what strategy was used but rather study strategy to see whether it consistently led to success.

It was at this time that backgammon was invented and began to be popular. It is a kind of paradigm of how wealth is acquired, which in this world is not the reward of intelligence or ability, just as luck is not a product of skill... If luck favours the player, he gets what he wants; if it doesn't, a skilled and prudent man cannot win that which fortune only bestows on whom it likes. It is thus that the good things of this world are apportioned by chance.

When competing one-on-one, follow two simple rules: If you are the favorite, simplify the game. If you are the underdog, make it more complicated.

he didn’t say anything to the contrary or interrupt me in any way, which was nice. (Polite listening skills really are rare, don’t you think?)

Why leave your success up to dumb luck or accident when you can take a stand, make a plan, and be proactive in your pursuits and possibilities?

Investing is 95% luck and 5% skill. And maybe if I’m wrong, it’s 98 and 2.

If you are the stronger player, simplify the interaction to emphasize your skill. If you are the underdog, complicate the game to introduce more luck into the outcome.

When most people come to believe the same thing, large gaps open up between price and value.

There are no good or bad horses, just correctly or incorrectly priced ones. This principle holds across all probabilistic domains: again, the goal is to get more than you pay for.

It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck

As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to—those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.

My skills are unique. Forged over a lifetime of dedication and hard work. It is not talent. It is not luck. It is nothing less than perseverance that makes me the best at what I do. For

Rules, premises, wagers, psychology, skill levels, timing, conditions… All these ‘invisible variables’ determine the outcome of the game before it even begins. There’s no such thing as luck.” —Luck. It was just another name for an unpredictable fate, dictated by invisible variables.

The point is, you live like I did, you start being able to spot what makes some people sink and other people swim. There’s a quality, I don’t even know how to describe it—sometimes it looks like luck and sometimes it looks like skill and sometimes it doesn’t look like either one. But you have it, I saw it when I met you. You’ve made a lot of mistakes, but you’re a good bet. You’ll swim.

For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth … we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.

Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success.* The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

The first time you fail it is a mistake, the second time it is carelessness, the third time it is incompetence, the fourth time it is mediocrity, and the fifth time it is inability. The first time you succeed it is chance, the second time it is luck, the third time it is skill, the fourth time it is talent, and the fifth time it is genius.

For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth . . . we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.

Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random, there is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events. In fact, inducing people to mistake luck for skills, or pointless actions for control, is one of the easiest enterprises a research psychologist can engage in ask people to control flashing lights by pressing a dummy button, and they will believe they are succeeding even though the lights are flashing at random. Show people a circle of lights that flash at random and tell them that by concentrating they can cause the flashing to move in clockwise direction, and they will astonish themselves with their ability to make it happen.

Infuse your life with action. Don't wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen.

Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: Producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles—flair, persistence, and luck.

The scientist’s behavior while facing the refutation of his ideas has been studied in depth as part of the so-called attribution bias. You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness. This explains why these scientists attributed their failures to the “ten sigma” rare event, indicative of the thought that they were right but that luck played against them. Why? It is a human heuristic that makes us actually believe so in order not to kill our self-esteem and keep us going against adversity.

Capitalism is hard. But part of the reason this happens is because getting money and keeping money are two different skills. Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.

How many times had he felt alone at midnight, with the hard dark pressing in and no sign of morning? Many times before, and with luck he would survive this one as he had survived the others. No, he decided. With more than luck. With every skill of reasoning and power of concentration he had. That, plus some good old fashioned lowdown strength of will.

Skill is no substitute for luck.

You can't have luck when someone else has skills

The first time you succeed it is chance; the second time it is luck; the third time it is skill; the fourth time it is talent; and the fifth time it is genius.

Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion, and the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world.

this holding has proved extraordinarily profitable thanks to a move by your Chairman that combined luck and skill—110% luck, the balance skill.

Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters.

Relationships take skill, not perfection or luck!

You need skill to be a sniper, but you also need opportunity. And luck.

You can now sell your considerable skills, Mr. Starbuck, for their true value in the open marketplace of the Free Enterprise System. Happy hunting! Good luck!

Dumb luck and flying by the seat of your pants can only get you so far in life.

Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.

Stay low, go fast, kill first, die last, one shot, one kill, no luck, all skill. —UNOFFICIAL NAVY SEAL SLOGAN There is only the trying. The rest is not our business. —T. S. ELIOT CHARACTERS

Today, talent needs the kind of luck that favors the incompetent; in fact, if a skilled man rejects the vile arrangements that bring success to rampant mediocrity, he will never get on at all.

As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him. For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth . . . we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.

Randomness and luck are related, but there is a useful distinction between the two. You can think of randomness as operating at the level of a system and luck operating at the level of the individual.

According to business and economics professor Paul Harvey, “a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations.”1 If you believe that you’re special, and all you have to do is find your singular passion and turn it into a perfect job, that’s a recipe for disaster. The reality is that the world owes you nothing. You only become “special” by developing skills that are in demand, which takes focus, grit, and long-term work.

Frank was by far the best kisser I'd ever had the pleasure to make out with. Being able to wrap his tongue around so many languages couldn't have hurt his skill of wrapping his tongue around mine. It felt like he controlled my whole body when he kissed me, his hands on my face, his fingers reaching the back of my head as we tried to consume each other, like only one of us could come out alive at the end. And his mouth tasted more like the sweet aroma of coffee than the bitter flavor.

The human mind has a tendency to observe unsystematic events and assign a pattern to the results. A habitual risk-taker reorganizes the stream of random events and retrospectively attributes the outcome of indiscriminate trials to their own gambling “strategies.” We often hear people say that they are lucky or unlucky, when in actuality they can claim no ownership in the occurrence of chaotic outcomes. A false sense of the existence of luck can cause people to discount the value of their actual effort, skill, and training.

Don't look for knowledge, look for wisdom. Don't look for opinions, look for facts. Don't look for theories, look for evidence. Don't look for speculation, look for certainties. Don't look for certificates, look for competance. Don't look for degrees, look for diligence. Don't look for position, look for influence. Don't look for jobs, look for a career. Don't look for skills, look for talents. Don't look for approval, look for individuality. Don't look for validation, look for self acceptance. Don't look for empires, look for happiness. Don't look for popularity, look for excellence. Don't look for acclaim, look for performance. Don't look for conquests, look for brilliance. Don't look for followers, look for friends. Don't look for muscles, look for courage. Don't look for appearance, look for character. Don't look for body, look for heart. Don't look for sexmates, look for helpmates. Don't look for vengance, look for mercy. Don't look for fate, look for opportunity. Don't look for luck, look for destiny. Don't look for fate, look for opportunity. Don't look for wealth, look for health. Don't look for today, look for tomorrow. Don't look for miracles, look for faith. Don't look for religion, look for love. Don't look for messiahs, look for peace. Don't look for temples, look for truth. Don't look for angels, look for God.

Pre-eminent amongst Rincewind's talents was his skill in running away, which over the years he had elevated to the status of a genuinely pure science; it didn't matter if you were fleeing from or to, so long as you were fleeing. It was flight alone that counted. I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I'll still be.

But even if we were entirely successful at eliminating inequalities of outcome associated with being born into wealth or privilege, the inequalities that remain would not be purged of luck. There would still be another type of luck lurking in the background: genes. This is true not only of standardized test performance and IQ scores. Even appealing to so-called “character” traits (grit, perseverance, resourcefulness, motivation, curiosity, or any other non-cognitive skill) doesn’t get you out of grappling with genetics. These traits, too, are shaped by genetic differences between people. There is no measure of so-called “merit” that is somehow free of genetic influence or untethered from biology.

Rewarding travel on two wheels requires technical expertise, proper preparation, rapid decision making, persistence and flexibility. It may take years to develop the required skill sets and the focused state of mind but the rewards for participating proficiently are enormous. As with most great achievements in life, luck has very little to do with it.

John Henry Holliday believed in science, in rationality, and in free will. He believed in study, in the methodical acquisition and accumulation of useful skills. He believed that he could homestead his future with planning and preparation: sending scouts ahead and settling it with pioneering effort. Above all, he believed in practice, which increased predictability and reduced the element of chance in any situation. The very word made him feel calm. Piano practice. Dental practice. Pistol practice, poker practice. Practice was power. Practice was authority over his own destiny. Luck? That was what fools called ignorance and laziness and despair when they gave themselves up to the turn of a card, and lost, and lost, and lost …

You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness. This explains why these scientists attributed their failures to the “ten sigma” rare event, indicative of the thought that they were right but that luck played against them. Why? It is a human heuristic that makes us actually believe so in order not to kill our self-esteem and keep us going against adversity.

I did not know how to deal with this sort of death, the one that comes slow and inevitable and does not let go. I am a soldier. I deal in cannonballs and rifle shots. I understand how a wound can fester and kill a soldier, but there is still the initial wound, something that can be avoided with a little skill and a great deal of luck. Death that simply comes and settles is not a thing I had any experience with.

This is the queasy shadowland, and they don’t even work hard at that because they have never learned to work at anything. They turn sloppy, and when the youngness is gone, there isn’t much left. Just the dead eyes and the small meaty skills and the feeling their luck went bad sometime, when they weren’t watching. Fifteen to twenty-five is the span, and they age quickly and badly. These are the bunnies who never find a burrow.

About five miles back I had a brush with the CHP. Not stopped or pulled over: nothing routine. I always drive properly. A bit fast, perhaps, but always with consummate skill and a natural feel for the road that even cops recognize. No cop was ever born who isn't a sucker for a finely-executed hi-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those cloverleaf freeway interchanges. Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him ... and then he will start apologizing, begging for mercy. This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. The thing to do – when you're running along about 100 or so and you suddenly find a red-flashing CHP-tracker on your tail – what you want to do then is accelerate. Never pull over with the first siren-howl. Mash it down and make the bastard chase you at speeds up to 120 all the way to the next exit. He will follow. But he won't know what to make of your blinker-signal that says you're about to turn right. This is to let him know you're looking for a proper place to pull off and talk ... keep signaling and hope for an off-ramp, one of those uphill side-loops with a sign saying "Max Speed 25" ... and the trick, at this point, is to suddenly leave the freeway and take him into the chute at no less than 100 miles an hour. He will lock his brakes about the same time you lock yours, but it will take him a moment to realize that he's about to make a 180-degree turn at this speed ... but you will be ready for it, braced for the Gs and the fast heel-toe work, and with any luck at all you will have come to a complete stop off the road at the top of the turn and be standing beside your automobile by the time he catches up. He will not be reasonable at first ... but no matter. Let him calm down. He will want the first word. Let him have it. His brain will be in a turmoil: he may begin jabbering, or even pull his gun. Let him unwind; keep smiling. The idea is to show him that you were always in total control of yourself and your vehicle – while he lost control of everything.

It's luck. All is luck when skill's played out. It was luck left me with a face that didn't fit in Contact, it's luck that's made you a great game-player, it's luck that's put you here tonight. Neither of us were fully planned, Jernau Gurgeh; your genes determined you and your mother's genofixing made certain you would not be a cripple or mentally subnormal. The rest is chance. I was brought into being with the freedom to be myself; if what that general plan and that particular luck produced is something a majority — a majority, mark you; not all — of one SC admissions board decides is not what they just happen to want, is it my fault? Is it?" "No," Gurgeh sighed, looking down. "Oh, it's all so wonderful in the Culture, isn't it, Gurgeh; nobody starves and nobody dies of disease or natural disasters and nobody and nothing's exploited, but there's still luck and heartache and joy, there's still chance and advantage and disadvantage.

Lem felt sick, not merely because of what had happened to Wes Dalberg but because of all the deaths yet to come. He was proud of both his management and investigatory skills, and he knew he could handle this case better than anyone else. But he was also a hardheaded pragmatist, incapable of underestimating the enemy or of pretending there would be a quick ending to this nightmare. He would need time and patience and luck to track down the killer, and meanwhile more bodies would pile up.

I wasn’t even certain if my wings were meant for flight. I hadn’t exactly had any luck with it the one time I’d tried. I could glide, though. Probably. Maybe. Should worse come to worst, I could smoke up to them. Turn to dragon right there, dig my claws in, and hang on. That might do it. Looked like I was about to find out. What I hadn’t thought about, what I’d completely managed to forget about, was that I wasn’t exactly skilled at maintaining my transformed shape, either. The reminder came to me rather forcibly as I was streaming my way east, over the channel, and felt myself beginning to solidify. No. No! Yes. Several thousand feet up in the air, I Turned back into a girl. Screaming, cartwheeling, everything topsy-turvy purple as gravity reclaimed me and I plummeted down to the water. fly! sang the stars, weighing in past my screams. fly, beast! It was a damned near save. I was a girl and then I wasn’t, managing the Turn so close to the sea that the foam from the cresting waves splashed up through the smoke of me. Good thing I didn’t have a real heart just then. It would have stopped entirely.

Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I? Acknowledgments I owe huge thanks to the amazing Darley Anderson and everyone at the agency, especially Mary, Emma, Pippa, Rosanna and Kristina; Andrea Schulz, my wonderful editor, whose enormous skill, patience and wisdom have made this book so much better than I thought it could be; Ben Petrone, who is just plain great, and everyone at Viking; Susanne Halbleib and everyone at Fischer Verlage; Katy Loftus, for her faith in this book and for putting her finger on the one thing that would make the most difference; my brother, Alex French, for the computer bits and for sending me the link to the case of Bella in the Wych Elm; Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for the medical bits; Ellen at ancestrysisters.com, for genealogy help; Dave Walsh, for his enormous help with the intricacies of police procedure; Ciara Considine, Clare Ferraro and Sue Fletcher,

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time.

the encounter from a holdup to one that involved, at least to some degree, a rational democratic decision. In this case his success was largely dependent on luck: the robbers could have been drunk, or alienated beyond the reach of reason, and then he might have been seriously hurt. But the point is still valid: human relations are malleable, and if a person has the appropriate skills their rules can be transformed. But before considering in more depth how relationships can be reshaped to provide optimal experiences, it is necessary to take a detour through the realms of solitude. Only after understanding a bit better how being alone affects the mind can we see more clearly why companionship is so indispensable to well-being.

Thank you, Clara,” I say. “How did you get the key?” “Dumb luck,” she says. “Those twins with the funny names dropped it just a few feet away from me.” “They… dropped it?” Those guys are the most skilled sleight-of-hand tricksters I’ve ever seen. Hard to imagine either of them dropping anything. “Yeah, they were juggling a bunch of things between them as they walked. The key just fell and they didn’t notice.” “But you did.” “Sure.” “How did you know it was the key to our police car?” She lifts the key tag to show me. It’s a clear plastic holder that’s probably meant for pictures. This one frames a piece of paper with a note scrawled in little-kid block letters: “Penryn’s police car—Super Secret.” If I ever see the twins again, it looks like I owe them a zombie-girl mud fight.

There is an inherent, humbling cruelty to learning how to run white water. In most other so-called "adrenaline" sports—skiing, surfing and rock climbing come to mind—one attains mastery, or the illusion of it, only after long apprenticeship, after enduring falls and tumbles, the fatigue of training previously unused muscles, the discipline of developing a new and initially awkward set of skills. Running white water is fundamentally different. With a little luck one is immediately able to travel long distances, often at great speeds, with only a rudimentary command of the sport's essential skills and about as much physical stamina as it takes to ride a bicycle downhill. At the beginning, at least, white-water adrenaline comes cheap. It's the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns. The river seems all smoke and mirrors, lots of bark (you hear it chortling away beneath you, crunching boulders), but not much bite. You think: Let's get on with it! Let's run this damn river! And then maybe the raft hits a drop in the river— say, a short, hidden waterfall. Or maybe a wave reaches up and flicks the boat on its side as easily as a horse swatting flies with its tail. Maybe you're thrown suddenly into the center of the raft, and the floor bounces back and punts you overboard. Maybe you just fall right off the side of the raft so fast you don't realize what's happening. It doesn't matter. The results are the same. The world goes dark. The river— the word hardly does justice to the churning mess enveloping you— the river tumbles you like so much laundry. It punches the air from your lungs. You're helpless. Swimming is a joke. You know for a fact that you are drowning. For the first time you understand the strength of the insouciant monster that has swallowed you. Maybe you travel a hundred feet before you surface (the current is moving that fast). And another hundred feet—just short of a truly fearsome plunge, one that will surely kill you— before you see the rescue lines. You're hauled to shore wearing a sheepish grin and a look in your eye that is equal parts confusion, respect, and raw fear. That is River Lesson Number One. Everyone suffers it. And every time you get the least bit cocky, every time you think you have finally figured out what the river is all about, you suffer it all over again.

Hitler derived several things from his experience and achievements in World War I, without which his rise to power in 1933 would have been at the least problematical, and at the most inconceivable. Hitler survived the war as a combat soldier—a rifle carrier—in a frontline infantry regiment. The achievement was an extraordinary one based on some combination of near-miraculous luck and combat skill. The interpretive fussing over whether or not Hitler was a combat soldier because he spent most of the war in the part of the regiment described as regimental headquarters can be laid to rest as follows: Any soldier in an infantry regiment on an active front in the west in World War I must be considered to have been a combat soldier. Hitler’s authorized regimental weapon was the Mauser boltaction, magazine-fed rifle. This gives a basic idea of what Hitler could be called upon to do in his assignment at the front. As a regimental runner, he carried messages to the battalions and line companies of the regiment, and the more important ones had to be delivered under outrageously dangerous circumstances involving movement through artillery fire and, particularly later in the war, poison gas and the omnipresent rifle fire of the skilled British sniper detachments. --Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 96

Only as a young man playing pool all night for money had he been able to find what he wanted in life, and then only briefly. People thought pool hustling was corrupt and sleazy, worse than boxing. But to win at pool, to be a professional at it, you had to deliver. In a business you could pretend that skill and determination had brought you along, when it had only been luck and muddle. A pool hustler did not have the freedom to believe that. There were well-paid incompetents everywhere living rich lives. They arrogated to themselves the plush hotel suites and Lear Jets that America provided for the guileful and lucky far more than it did for the wise. You could fake and bluff and luck your way into all of it. Hotel suites overlooking Caribbean private beaches. Bl*wj*bs from women of stunning beauty. Restaurant meals that it took four tuxedoed waiters to serve, with the sauces just right. The lamb or duck in tureen sliced with precise and elegant thinness, sitting just so on the plate, the plate facing you just so on the heavy white linen, the silver fork heavy gleaming in your manicured hand below the broad cloth cuff and mother of pearl buttons. You could get that from luck and deceit even while causing the business or the army or the government that supported you to do poorly at what it did. The world and all its enterprises could slide downhill through stupidity and bad faith. But the long gray limousines would still hum through the streets of New York, of Paris, of Moscow, of Tokyo. Though the men who sat against the soft leather in back with their glasses of 12-year-old scotch might be incapable of anything more than looking important, of wearing the clothes and the hair cuts and the gestures that the world, whether it liked to or not, paid for, and always had paid for. Eddie would lie in bed sometimes at night and think these things in anger, knowing that beneath the anger envy lay like a swamp. A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth, cloth that was itself the color of money, could never be only pretense. Pool players were often cheats and liars, petty men whose lives were filled with pretensions, who ran out on their women and walked away from their debts. But on the table with the lights overhead beneath the cigarette smoke and the silent crowd around them in whatever dive of a billiard parlor at four in the morning, they had to find the wherewithal inside themselves to do more than promise excellence. Under whatever lies might fill the life, the excellence had to be there, it had to be delivered. It could not be faked. But Eddie did not make his living that way anymore.

A Season in Hell - 1854-1891 A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing. One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up. I armed myself against justice. I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure's been turned over to you! I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it. I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity. And Spring brought me the frightening laugh of the idiot. So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk! it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more. Charity is that key.—This inspiration proves I was dreaming! "You'll always be a hyena etc. . . ," yells the devil, who'd crowned me with such pretty poppies. "Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!" Ah! I've been through too much:-But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye! and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer, let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned.

Was this luck, or was it more than that? Proving skill is difficult in venture investing because, as we have seen, it hinges on subjective judgment calls rather than objective or quantifiable metrics. If a distressed-debt hedge fund hires analysts and lawyers to scrutinize a bankrupt firm, it can learn precisely which bond is backed by which piece of collateral, and it can foresee how the bankruptcy judge is likely to rule; its profits are not lucky. Likewise, if an algorithmic hedge fund hires astrophysicists to look for patterns in markets, it may discover statistical signals that are reliably profitable. But when Perkins backed Tandem and Genentech, or when Valentine backed Atari, they could not muster the same certainty. They were investing in human founders with human combinations of brilliance and weakness. They were dealing with products and manufacturing processes that were untested and complex; they faced competitors whose behaviors could not be forecast; they were investing over long horizons. In consequence, quantifiable risks were multiplied by unquantifiable uncertainties; there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns; the bracing unpredictability of life could not be masked by neat financial models. Of course, in this environment, luck played its part. Kleiner Perkins lost money on six of the fourteen investments in its first fund. Its methods were not as fail-safe as Tandem’s computers. But Perkins and Valentine were not merely lucky. Just as Arthur Rock embraced methods and attitudes that put him ahead of ARD and the Small Business Investment Companies in the 1960s, so the leading figures of the 1970s had an edge over their competitors. Perkins and Valentine had been managers at leading Valley companies; they knew how to be hands-on; and their contributions to the success of their portfolio companies were obvious. It was Perkins who brought in the early consultants to eliminate the white-hot risks at Tandem, and Perkins who pressed Swanson to contract Genentech’s research out to existing laboratories. Similarly, it was Valentine who drove Atari to focus on Home Pong and to ally itself with Sears, and Valentine who arranged for Warner Communications to buy the company. Early risk elimination plus stage-by-stage financing worked wonders for all three companies. Skeptical observers have sometimes asked whether venture capitalists create innovation or whether they merely show up for it. In the case of Don Valentine and Tom Perkins, there was not much passive showing up. By force of character and intellect, they stamped their will on their portfolio companies.

From Life, Volume III, by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey: I am constantly startled and often amused by the diverse attitudes toward wealth to be found among the peoples of the Oikumene. Some societies equate affluence with criminal skill; for others wealth represents the gratitude of society for the performance of valuable services. My own concepts in this regard are easy and clear, and I am sure that the word ‘simplistic’ will be used by my critics. These folk are callow and turgid of intellect; I am reassured by their howls and yelps. For present purposes I exclude criminal wealth, the garnering of which needs no elaboration, and a gambler’s wealth which is tinsel. In regard, then, to wealth: Luxury and privilege are the perquisites of wealth. This would appear a notably bland remark, but is much larger than it seems. If one listens closely, he hears deep and far below the mournful chime of inevitability. To achieve wealth, one generally must thoroughly exploit at least three of the following five attributes: Luck. Toil, persistence, courage. Self-denial. Short-range intelligence: cunning, improvisational ability. Long-range intelligence: planning, the perception of trends. These attributes are common; anyone desiring privilege and luxury can gain the precursory wealth by making proper use of his native competence. In some societies poverty is considered a pathetic misfortune, or noble abnegation, hurriedly to be remedied by use of public funds. Other more stalwart societies think of poverty as a measure of the man himself. The critics respond: What an unutterable ass is this fellow Unspiek! I am reduced to making furious scratches and crotchets with my pen! — Lionel Wistofer, in The Monstrator I am poor; I admit it! Am I then a churl or a noddy? I deny it with all the vehemence of my soul! I take my bite of seed-cake and my sip of tea with the same relish as any paunchy plutocrat with bulging eyes and grease running from his mouth as he engulfs ortolans in brandy, Krokinole oysters, filet of Darango Five-Horn! My wealth is my shelf of books! My privileges are my dreams! — Sistie Fael, in The Outlook … He moves me to tooth-chattering wrath; he has inflicted upon me, personally, a barrage of sheer piffle, and maundering insult which cries out to the Heavens for atonement. I will thrust my fist down his loquacious maw; better, I will horsewhip him on the steps of his club. If he has no club, I hereby invite him to the broad and convenient steps of the Senior Quill-drivers, although I must say that the Inksters maintain a superior bar, and this shall be my choice since, after trouncing the old fool, I will undoubtedly ask him in for a drink. — McFarquhar Kenshaw, in The Gaean

Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right.