The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [22]
It’s philosophical hypothesis time! Yay! If you’re running through a metropolitan area and you get stung by a bee, you might have reasonable grounds to consider this incident “unlucky.” You were just at the wrong place at the wrong time and no amount of preparation could have predicted or prevented this from happening. But what if you ran naked through an apiary? If you get stung by a bee or fifty, do you consider yourself unlucky or would you say to yourself, “Yeah, I prolly shoulda seen that comin’.” This fictitious stinging was made far more likely by the fact that you actively increased your odds of it happening. I find this to be the way life works: If you’re being lazy, eating shitty, putting off work to fuck around online or on your Xbox, you’re creating a very nonproductive aura that you may think is invisible but actually floats over your head like a life meter in an RPG. And it’s red, which tells everyone that you are “dangerously empty.” If this is the case, is it really that surprising that you just got fired? Or that other people are being promoted around you? Or that your significant other took the cat and moved out? I’m certainly not suggesting that everything is your fault, but it’s good to adopt the mind-set that crappy things might happen anyway, so why give them any encouragement? When you’re making positive, forward-momentum choices in your life, you will be amazed at how “lucky” you get. When you are focused on this idea of good luck, your brain’s filtering sensors will not only start to show you “lucky” events, they will also begin to build scenarios that will seem to generate more of the same to justify this focus.
Let’s go back to the bee analogy. You’re still naked, but change the apiary with bees to an orgy with humans and change the stinging to orgasms. If you’re ambling all nude through a sex lounge, you have just crafted a situation where you will probably “get lucky.” If you wish to achieve any kind of success in this life, do your best to surround yourself with an orgy of good choices (which you can only do once you accept that having choices is a good thing). This is how you create circumstantial luck.
CHARACTERCIZE
Write something that happened to you recently.
Write one way it could be considered bad luck and one way it could be considered good luck, just to demonstrate how perception affects value.
Write five “lucky” things that have happened to you, then determine if they were blind luck or circumstantial luck.
CONFIDENCE THEORY
Nerds struggle a fair bit with confidence. It’s one of the hardest dragons to tame. I’ve struggled with it my whole life. Why, here’s a good Nerdling story for you, dating back many laps around the sun:
When I was in eighth grade, I managed to get a proxy invite to a party. A kid I knew was going and I think his mom guilted him into taking me. So there we are, at this eighth-grade shindig at some obnoxious kid’s house whose parents were out of town (though our parents didn’t know that). Of course there was drinking and loud music (I was a stiff kid who enjoyed neither of those things—drinking didn’t start until college) and make-out closets and whatnot. We were, to say the least, out of place. We got the weird “Who the F invited you dorks?” looks from people. Remember the scene in Sixteen Candles when Anthony Michael Hall and his buddies go to Jake Ryan’s party? THAT. Eventually, a spontaneous game of Spin the Bottle breaks out. Up to this point,