Despite being a fairly rational person, I have come to believe that there is some wisdom to the phrase "you make your own luck".
The experience is purely anecdotal, but you see it manifest in all walks of life, granted you would expect luck to be streaky or not evenly distributed on the local level, but there seems to be an observable relationship between "lucky outcome" and confidence - think sports, business decisions etc.
If I had to offer an explanation for it, I would go with the fact that our brains are complex machines that have developed heuristics that are better than we realise at predicting outcomes and when we give ourselves to it (through confidence) we end up with outcomes working out positively more often than negatively.
The obvious counter argument would be selection bias - when you're up on your luck and your confidence is high, the losses don't seem to matter so much (and vice versa).
The experience is purely anecdotal, but you see it manifest in all walks of life, granted you would expect luck to be streaky or not evenly distributed on the local level, but there seems to be an observable relationship between "lucky outcome" and confidence - think sports, business decisions etc.
If I had to offer an explanation for it, I would go with the fact that our brains are complex machines that have developed heuristics that are better than we realise at predicting outcomes and when we give ourselves to it (through confidence) we end up with outcomes working out positively more often than negatively.
The obvious counter argument would be selection bias - when you're up on your luck and your confidence is high, the losses don't seem to matter so much (and vice versa).