Making Your Own Luck

Once you understand that more chances lead to more outcomes, the next question is obvious: if it’s that simple, why doesn’t everyone do it?

The answer is embarrassment.

Asking someone for an introduction.

Applying for a job you’re not fully qualified for.

Sharing an idea before it’s finished.

Admitting you don’t understand something in a meeting. None of these things put you in danger.

But almost everyone feels a jolt of discomfort before doing them, and most people let that discomfort decide the outcome for them.

The people who keep getting good outcomes are not braver in some deep way.

They have simply gotten more comfortable with a small amount of social risk.

They ask the question that might get a “no.”

They pitch the idea that might get ignored. They reach out to the person who might not reply.

You never see the people who wanted to ask and didn’t, only the person who asked and got a yes. That’s why this pattern is easy to miss and easy to repeat once you notice it.

In 2000, Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues at Cornell tested this fear directly. They put a student in an embarrassing T-shirt, sent him or her into a room of other students, then asked: what percentage of people in there could say who was on your shirt?

The average guess was 46 per cent. The real number was 23. The student had doubled, in their own head, the attention they were actually getting.

Gilovich got the same gap with flattering shirts too.

The size of the audience in your mind is a guess, not a measurement, built from how loud the moment feels to you, and it’s almost always wrong in the same direction.

Many opportunities are hidden behind thirty seconds of social discomfort, not intelligence.

This post reminds me of an incident in my Secondary School in 1981.

I was in form 3 (I was admitted into Form 1 in 1979).

Someone dared us to run to a tree in front of the Female Hostel in only his underpants, touch it & run back.

He placed ₦10 as the prize for whoever did it.

We thought of all the ways to do it & reduce the embarrassment:

"Can we cover our faces?"

"Can we do it at night?"

We were not sure the embarrassment was worth it (₦10 then is like ₦100k now- my pocket money per term was ₦5 then!)

One of my mates decided to take it on...

He undressed down to his underpants, STROLLED to the tree (it was about 4pm), touched it, STROLED back, dressed up & picked the ₦10 note.

Everybody was SHOCKED!

It was like he felt NO SHAME!

We were classmates 13-15 year age bracket.

And guess what...?

The girls in the Female Hostel didn't see him!

He couldn't care less if they did, anyway.

He was too focused on the money to be bothered about shame.

I later asked him why he did it.

He said he thought of the worst-case scenario: people would LAUGH at him, that's all...

And after laughing at him, life would go on- but he would be ₦10 richer!

"They would only laugh for tops, two weeks before something else would come up to take their interest away from it. It was worth it to ME", he concluded.

That was DEEP for a 13 Y/O, if you ask me!

That experience practically killed SHAME in me.

That was 35 years ago; I've NEVER felt any EMBARRASSMENT over ANYTHING since that day.

"What will People Say" NEVER comes up in my mind when making decisions.

If you don't like MY decisions, that's YOUR Problem, not mine!

-Haruna Daniels