Luckmaking

“Chance is the fool’s name for fate.” 
Guy Holden in The Gay Divorcee

Maybe the single most important ingredient we can put into the Ingenarium is the one thing we have no power over whatsoever.  You cannot practice it, exercise it, get better at it, or bottle it.  Yet no artist or scientist or entrepreneur would be able to succeed without it.  In fact, success on all levels, including life itself, depends on it.

That ingredient is luck.

You need it for any project to work out; you need to be healthy enough, hearty enough, with the right kind of support, at the exact place and proper time, with the best idea and the most effective skills at the ideal moment.  That is a lot to ask.  Some of this you work at but most of it relies on happenstance beyond your control just working out for you.  Or not working at all.

Take the case of Diamond.

Diamond was the name of Isaac Newton’s dog.  Newton, of course, is well known as the inventor of calculus and a theory of gravity and color theory, among many other things.  Lots of luck there in a number of ways, not the least of which was not succumbing to the plague that was ravaging London at the time of his earliest achievements.

But in his diary, Newton wrote that at one point he was working on a promising new theory of chemistry when his dog, Diamond, knocked a candle over and started a fire that destroyed all the work.  That was a massive dose of bad luck that stopped him in his tracks.  Newton went on to other breakthroughs but that particular work was completely lost.

We only know that story because Newton was lucky enough to do other work that had better fortune.  Who knows how many untold achievements have been sacrificed to rotten luck, to accidents of time and place?

On the other hand, of course, good luck can also seem like fate taking a hand.  In 1917, the artist Georgia O’Keefe was a young, struggling painter living in New York.  One day she decided to go for a walk and just so happened to end up on Fifth Avenue.  Of all the people out walking that day, she just so happened to bump into – actually bump into - a man who just so happened to be Alfred Steiglitz, the photographer.  Steiglitz at the time, and as luck would have it, just so happened to run a photography gallery and this just so happened to be the day that he had decided to expand the gallery to include paintings as well.  Naturally, O’Keefe just so happened to have some photos of her work with her.

Stieglitz liked the work enough to show it, liked her enough to begin taking portraits of her, and so on.  This chance encounter with all of its tiny particles of good luck began a great artistic partnership that lasted their entire lives.

We all know stories like these in our daily lives and the history of creativity is filled with artful and awful accidents.  Whether you see this as fate or chance is a matter of attitude but either way, it would serve us very well to throw some luck into the Ingenarium brew.  Or at least the idea of striving for luck.  Or befriending fate.

How exactly do you do that?  What secret recipe can we include to insure good luck and eshew bad?   No clue, and good luck on figuring it out.  We can do whatever we can to improve our chances of success by trying and retrying.  We can stay focused and not give up and take our best shots and do all the other things self-help and creativity books tell us to do.  We can do what we can to stay on the good side of fate; look both ways before we cross the street, stop smoking, cultivate helpful acquaintances, and so on. 

But in the end luck is luck and all we can do is strive for it, whatever that means to us, and hope for the best. 

So good luck as we toss some into the mix.