© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Building Yourself Table of Contents
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• A throw of the dice will never abolish chance. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898)

Scientific views are unrealistic in a world of infinite complexity. I've had too much good luck, and enough bad luck, to respect luck for the non‑scientific phenomenon it is. You can measure probability and chance scientifically under laboratory conditions. You can extract valuable data from doing statistical research on large population groups. But luck, that's something different. Luck relates to you—a complex person operating in a complex world. Respect luck.

Now hold it, you say. Don't we all get the same chance out there? Isn't it more an attitude of being prepared to take advantage of the good luck that, sooner or later, comes our way, the way Allan Dwan did when they said “You direct.”

The answer is: not quite. Sure, it's a shame not to take advantage of opportunity when it stares us right in the face. “What, me direct?” It's absolutely true that luck has a soft spot for people who are ready to accept it, who are confident, who know what they're doing. But it's not the entire story. The rational or preparation theory of luck doesn't explain why one person walks into a bar, meets someone by chance who went to the same school, and is offered a fabulous new job, while the next person walks into the same bar and is invited home by a sweet looking axe murderer.

The fact is that luck is too complicated to allow for rational explanation. Rational views of luck are as removed from reality as is superstition. Except one. The notion that luck is contagious.

Good luck is contagious. Spend time with people who seem to win in life. All else being equal, you'll gain by your association with them in dozens of ways. You'll consciously and unconsciously begin to imitate them. An objective observer might remark that these winners aren't really lucky at all, that luck is just an abstraction, a convenient term for the results of a successful life. But life is never satisfied by purely objective, rational explanations.

Bad luck is—you guessed it—also contagious. I once worked as a legal editor. Within a corporation of perhaps three thousand career drones, the legal publishing division employed three hundred attorneys; these jobs were among the lowest on the legal totem pole. When five o'clock rolled along, you couldn't even get out of the parking lot because there were so many people trying to cram their little tin cars out. The clothing was uniformly polyester. If a man wore a tie at all, you could bet it had ketchup stains. I went nowhere in that job for five years until I finally got the luck of the draw—I was fired. I was forced to start my own business. I began to deal with professionals and entrepreneurs. I began, slowly, to absorb much of their creativity and enthusiasm.

Associating with the real winners in life is a helpful building block of success, but avoiding the losers is even more important. There are more losers out there than winners. With a little practice, it also becomes easy to spot the losers. You run into your old friend from high school. He went to college for two years but dropped out after breaking his leg one summer. Not his fault, of course. He worked for a while in the local factory, but lost his job when the plant closed. Not his fault either. He was married for three years, then his wife ran away with a salesman, taking all their money and their infant child with her. Of course, he tried to keep the marriage going; the difficulties were entirely her fault.

We'll go into greater detail on the people you associate with in Chapter Ten: “Select.” But as to your unfortunate friend, you can be sure that continued association with him won't be beneficial to you. Just as you're unconsciously affected by the zest and energy of the “lucky” person, you'll be steadily brought down by the “unlucky” one.

The concept of “a friend in need” is all right—in the proper context. The phrase calls up a firm mature friendship in which you'll help your friends in their times of trouble. It doesn't mean, “a friend in perpetual need.” These people will drag you down into their own dismal swamp. People who put their arms around your neck and drag you under water to drown you are not friends. They're very bad for you. They're “bad luck.” There's no better term for it.

Real luck, good and bad, in the real world, is one of the key components of our next subject: reality.