Luck

[Smith31]

I enjoy Walters posts. I think he livens up the forum

 

[JP1]

I enjoy Walters posts. I think he livens up the forum

Me too. And if you don't agree or get bored with the topics, anyone is free to start their own...........................................

 

[Y Fan Wen]

Sometimes I lose the will to live reading Walters threads!

And conversely, I always find them most interesting.
I just cannot visualise the mindset of those who deprecate his musings.

 

[JP1]

And conversely, I always find them most interesting.
I just cannot visualise the mindset of those who deprecate his musings.

And just to add to that, I may not agree with what George Monbiot writes but I read his output to challenge my own thoughts and assumptions and sharpen up my own mindset too

 

[Enfoff]

The harder you work, the luckier you will be.

I like this better than the (supposed )Gary Player quote "the more I practice the luckier I get"

According to Red Dwarf luck is a virus which you catch now and then.

 

[chipchap]

I was always told that fortune favoured the brave.

 

[Courier]

The harder you work, the luckier you will be.

"The man who said hard work never harmed anybody was a liar."

 

[ThatsSomeSheep]

I should be so lucky.

TSS

 

[Walterp]

It's bad luck Walter that interest rates aren't a million per cent for you savers ......

You mis-judge me - at various times I've been rich and poor, a saver and a borrower, a miser and a spendthrift, and done both wise and foolish things.

In my opinion you are doing pretty well if you can achieve the Two/Three Rule - of any set of ideas you have, two out of the three will be sound, and one will be terrible.

The secret of success is, I believe, recognising the bad idea before it inflicts too much damage. (I'm not very good at that, in case you wondered).

 

[puppet]

"The man who said hard work never harmed anybody was a liar."

Arbeit macht frei.
Visit there sometime and you will appreciate the ultimate irony. Hard work did not do much for many of those poor people

 

[Grassman]

I enjoy Walters posts. I think he livens up the forum

So do I. It gives me a chance to learn new words like today's (ascribe)!
I don't agree with a lot of his waffle but it is good to discuss the topics.

 

[Happy at it]

i think i believe in bad luck more than i think i do good. I've seen some people who pushed on in life, perhaps not the straightest, taking advantage of others misfortune etc end up very unlucky.

 

[delilah]

Not necessarily.........

Agreed, and whilst hard work may shorten the odds on having good luck, I also think there is much in the somewhat redundant advice that Flora was given by her father in Lark Rise to Candleford: "Don't be born poor."

 

[Pieces_of_Eight]

Sometimes I lose the will to live reading Walters threads!

Their autoethnographical nature indicates that their main purpose is to be written, rather than read.

All are thought provoking, but I suspect often it is only his own thoughts he is provoking.

I mean no malice by that, it is purely my own interpretation of Walter's threads.

 

[beefandsleep]

I’m not really sure about the point of the thread, I thought when I opened it that it would be about luck penny.
However Walter, apart from the bed your born in there’s not really any such thing as luck. You make your own in this life and in the tale you told that’s exactly what you did. You spied an opportunity and took it. The rest is history.

 

[beefandsleep]

I really hope no one turns up with the quote " you make your own luck "

Lol, oops sorry. [emoji23]

 

[Derrick Hughes]

"The man who said hard work never harmed anybody was a liar."

Hard Work as sent many to an early grave including my brother who truly worked himself to death , for what .so I could have a better life . I would sooner have my brother back if I had the choice

 

[chipchap]

There is bad luck.
But also there is achieving a poor result by not planning properly, or having unrealistic expectations, or relying on unreliable people.

Sometimes it is just better to go the easy way.

 

[Grassman]

However Walter, apart from the bed your born in there’s not really any such thing as luck. You make your own in this life and in the tale you told that’s exactly what you did. You spied an opportunity and took it. The rest is history.

Of course there is luck. Some are born lucky in that their parents steer them in the right direction. Some are lucky that they enjoy school work and through that get a good career. Some may be lucky they get a teacher who puts in the effort with pupils. Some win the lottery.
Some are in the right place at the right time. You can't plan that.

 

[bobk]

A friend, now beset by bereavement and illness, used to declare that 'if I didn't have bad luck I'd have no luck at all...'. And it's true, I believe, that some people seem to receive very little luck in their endeavours.

For the rest of us, good and bad luck probably comes in waves - things can be on a roll, with things falling neatly into place just as if it was planned that way, or things go wrong one thing after another.

I like to think it all evens out over a lifetime (others prefer to ascribe their good fortune to superior judgement - I reckon they obviously haven't had enough bad luck happen to them; but that's just me). The trick in business is, I think, to ride out the bad luck long enough for some good luck to reappear.

Looking back on a working lifetime of generally good luck, my luckiest break came early on. I was beavering away for an employer with a wonderful practice suffering from benign neglect. My boss had inherited it from his father, an able but irascible solicitor, and since he had decided to be the polar opposite of his old man he treated his clients with a mixture of charm and indifference. It worked well enough, because no one else was particularly well-organised either.

The timing was interesting: by the mid 1980's it became obvious that computers would alter professional practice enormously. By then my employer was 'almost ready to retire' - a phrase that, along with 'our farm' and 'a real character', ought to be proscribed. I drew the obvious conclusion, and decided that I wanted 'in'.

In a burst of over-enthusiasm and naivety I pointed out to my employer that my contract did not contain a non-competition clause, and that I could volunteer a ten mile/two year restriction. God knows why I said anything so stupid. God decided to make my employer just as stupid, when he replied 'that's perfectly alright old boy, nothing wrong with competition if it doesn't work out between us'.

It didn't, of course. And I was then able to set up in direct competition with a modern and efficient practice which - in a surprisingly short time - both denuded my old boss of most of his clientele and made me enough money to contemplate buying a farm.

The better I get the luckier I get .... Gary Player ... and he's no fool .

My boss ended up retiring after all, but not in the way he envisaged.

Just good luck, really - if he'd thought about it, and took the threat I represented rather more seriously, none of it would've happened.