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This is definitely something I've seen in my own life.

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Like when I was younger, I thought I was so unlucky to be born in the middle of nowhere.

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You know, the small town, the parents didn't have a lot of money and they were young and they, you know, not a lot of access to resources, no outside connections, anything like that.

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And the older I got, the more I realized like, oh, if I was, if you were going to grow up like that, the time and place where I grew up actually turned out to be a very good time and place to grow up like that.

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The nineties and early two thousands in, in the Midwest and in the middle of America and, uh,

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I was a free range kid.

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We had that advantage.

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You know, it was a small enough place where you could just let your kids go.

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Had dial up internet, you know, as a teenager.

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Also to this, like there was this community aspect that I realized later on that all those big city kids didn't have that I had growing up.

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The community actually looked after children like it was really a village raising the kids around there.

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And that frame of reference of mine kind of changed over time.

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And I talked to people who I grew up with who don't see it that way still, too.

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So you're right.

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It absolutely is like compared to what?

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Right.

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And they keep comparing it to all these other things.

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But when I see it, I see like the good fortune that I had to have the people around me where I was who who helped me.

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really grow as, as you know, as a young person, but it was a general shift.

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I mean, good luck, bad luck, who knows, you know, totally.

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I had that.

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Yeah.

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The frame of reference piece here is, is so important, right?

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Because it used to be, you know, if you grew up in a small pod on town, you know,

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you had no frame of reference.

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You didn't know what you were missing out on.

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You didn't know how other people were potentially growing up.

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Same thing if you were born in Sierra Leone 100 years ago.

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You had no conception that anywhere else in the world was any different than where you were, right?

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And so a hidden side effect of, quote-unquote, connecting the world through the internet is that we all become suddenly aware of hundreds or thousands of reference points

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that make our current situation seem less fortunate.

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We are hyper-aware of all of the things that we lack and that we don't have access to and that we... advantages we didn't get, situations we haven't experienced.

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And I think that puts a downward pressure on our perception of our own fortune.

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The effect of that is that you actually get people who have grown up in extremely fortunate circumstances or had very fortunate lives...

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feeling unbelievably oppressed and disadvantaged for like the tiniest things.

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My grandmother talks about this a lot.

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She was a child of the depression.

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You know, she was young when the depression was going on.

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And she said, we were poor, but we didn't know it because everybody was poor around us.

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They made dresses out of flower sacks.

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And they, you know, they had, they would just organize dances amongst the kids on the weekends because they didn't have any money to do anything else.

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And she's like, we had a great time and we didn't know we were poor.

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The takeaway from all that for me anyway is that

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Yeah, you can't control heaven luck, but you also really can't interpret it correctly either.

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Like, you know, you can say that, oh, this is a terrible way.

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Like we just said with the Sierra Leone versus Norway or my situation or whatever.

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It's really hard to interpret it correctly.

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Good luck, bad luck.

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Who knows?

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One of the reasons...

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For that, though, is some of the biases that are constantly working in the background for us.

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Just a couple of those I want to point out.

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One of the big ones is the actor-observer bias.

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In that, when we observe other people's behavior, we usually attribute that to their character.

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And then when we observe our own behavior, we usually attribute a lot of it to circumstances.

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So, like, classic examples, getting cut off in traffic versus being cut off in traffic.

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If you cut someone else off, I was like, well, I'm in a hurry and, you know, my grandma's sick or, you know, this is like I've had a bad day, whatever.

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When they cut you off, though, they're just an asshole.

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They're a horrible person.

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Yeah.

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And so and so instead of just like seeing that, like a lot of things are just random and there's chance and there's luck involved to it, we just have this real like deep desire to attribute actions to some sort of meaning.

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Right.

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And usually that meaning is someone's character or the they're who they are.

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Right.

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Rather than just this just happened.

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Right.

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Right.

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So it's like, if I'm struggling, it's because all these horrible things have happened to me.

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But if you're struggling, it's because you are, there's some failure of character.

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You're irresponsible.

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You make terrible decisions.

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You don't know what you're doing, et cetera, et cetera.

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Someone's rude to you and they're an asshole or something like that.

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Maybe they've been up since 4 a.m. and they've been taking care of a sick parent or child.

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You don't see all of those things, right?

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It's almost impossible for us to interpret any kind of luck, but especially heaven luck too, right?

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There's so many complicated factors that go into it.

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The other one is hindsight bias.

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The farmer and the horse story, you know, there's hindsight bias all the time.

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Like the sun keeps coming up.

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Oh, this is good luck.

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This is bad luck.

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After the fact, right?

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We can look back and say this was good luck because of how it turned out.

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But you really don't know whether that is good luck or bad luck.

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So the point is, is that we're just very, very biased not to see luck and fortune in a very accurate way.

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Like all of our perspectives.

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Yes.

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Ultimately, they are self-serving to our own interests.

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All biases pretty much end up there.

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That's true.

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Here's the thing about these biases is that you're not necessarily stuck with them, too.

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You can kind of train yourself to see luck, maybe not in an accurate way, but a more beneficial way, at least.

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One of those ways is through gratitude.

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Right.

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OK, what gratitude is, is like an expansion of your frame of reference.

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For example, like you could sit here and say, well, the sun rising in the morning, that's not lucky.

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That's just that's what happens.

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It's just what's it's what happens on Earth.

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Right.

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There's nothing lucky about that.

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But if you broaden your frame of reference a little bit and you think about, well, you're floating on a rock.

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and infinite nothingness hurtling through space.

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Why we're here, we don't know.

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Yeah.

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I mean, there's millions of other planets that probably- Billions, trillions maybe.

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Trillions that, and as far as we know, none of them have a sun that can support life that has a regular rotation and all these things.

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Yeah.

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That seems incredibly lucky, right?

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You and I and everybody else listening to this, you are the product of literally billions of years of literally perfect evolution.

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Yeah.

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Not a single thing went wrong in that cosmically impossible chain of events.

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Not one single thing went wrong.

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That's like the widest frame that I usually get to.

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I mean, that is incredible, right?

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And we'd like go all the way back to the beginning of time.

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Not a single thing went wrong to produce this moment right now.

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That's insane.

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And.

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It's an expansion of your reference point, though, too.

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And this is what happens, I think, with people when you don't see the luck around you is that you get so narrowly focused on something like, oh, this bad thing happened and it's bad for me right now.

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But if you step back and widen that frame of reference a little bit.

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And if you can do that through gratitude, you know, I've kind of poo-pooed on gratitude before, like, that's kind of a hokey practice or whatever.

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But I am a pretty just grateful person in general.

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And so I don't I don't feel like I have to practice it.

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But if you aren't a grateful person, you can practice it and you can widen your references away.

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I've always been kind of lukewarm on the gratitude thing, but I think prepping this episode and thinking of it in this way really explained it to me.

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Gratitude really is the mental exercise of just imagining all of the potential worse realities that you could exist in.

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And by doing that mental exercise, it generates a sense of a positive feeling and optimism and hope for the future that...

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that really came from nothing.

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Like you really, it allows you to kind of conjure those feelings out of nothing to help you move forward.

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And I think that's, it's an incredibly powerful thing and it's an incredible mental tool that you can use to propel yourself forward.

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Yeah, I think that's why I feel like I haven't had a lot of bad luck or I think I've seen all the alternatives because of the way I grew up and where I grew up.

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There were a lot of examples around me that didn't turn out as well.

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And I was like, I easily could have been one of them and I'm not.

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And that's an expansion of your frame of reference, too.

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Right.

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Like just like you're saying all the things that could have gone wrong that didn't go wrong.

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There's kind of a geographic lottery, a demographic lottery.

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There's a talent matching lottery.

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There's a time horizon lottery.

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You can expand your frame of reference in all those different ways to generate a sense of gratitude as well, right?

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Like, so if you feel bad about where you live, well, you can easily imagine a worse place to live.

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If you feel bad about the time you live in, well, it's not very hard to reach back and find a much worse time to live.

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If you feel bad about...

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your particular talent or aptitudes for certain things, it's not hard to think of things that you'd be even worse at than whatever you're doing.

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It's funny.

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I had a viral tweet a couple of years ago that I love name checking myself on my own podcast here, but this, this was a banger.

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So I'm, I'm proud of it.

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So I said, uh, your ancestors survived centuries of floods, wars, famine, slavery, and plagues for you to sit on the toilet and compare your life to people on the internet.

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That's a vivid image.

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Yeah.

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The point isn't necessarily to make you feel guilty about it though, right?

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The point is just that like you can widen your frame of reference.

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You can, there's a different way to look at this, right?

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We talk a lot about, you know, cognitive reframing and all that in a lot of different ways.

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And this is just another form of that.

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Expanding your frame of reference, though, is the way to do this.

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And there's real tangible benefits to this, too.

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So the research they've done, like positive emotions in general, gratitude especially, though, they literally do broaden your attentional scope.

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When you broaden your scope, those positive emotions kind of have a positive feedback loop where you broaden your attentional scope and you start to see things.

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more things, more opportunities in your environment.

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So it's like luck begets luck.

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There's like an upward spiral that kind of happens from this.

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Because you expand your frame of reference, you say, okay, well, this didn't happen.

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That didn't happen.

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I'm here.

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Now you see all these other possibilities.

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You're going to see more chance opportunities

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in your environment just by broadening your frame of reference.

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Yeah, it makes sense.

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If you broaden that aperture of how you see yourself, you open yourself up to way more connections and possibilities than you would have had otherwise.

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And I think this kind of explains that research that I talked about at the top of the episode, right?

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Where it's like the lucky people...

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were the ones who spotted the money sitting on the ground.

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They're the ones who spotted the really interesting person sitting in the coffee shop and started a conversation with them, which then just makes them feel luckier, which then just makes it easier to imagine a world where they didn't

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see those things or take that action, which it's so yeah, it kind of becomes like a flywheel of good fortune.

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This is also going to be really important as we get into the next chapters, because as we get into earth luck and human luck, so much of maximizing earth luck and human luck, like those are the two forms of luck that you actually can actively increase in your life.

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And so much of that we're going to find is simply either a seen a wider range of possibilities than you see now and then seeing the situation clearly, like being able to be realistic and rational about like a decision in front of you.

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And so if you are very kind of narrow minded and closed off and how you see yourself and you just see yourself living a very unfortunate existence, you see yourself as very uniquely victimized or screwed over in some way.

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A, you're not going to have that wider horizon to see future possibilities.

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And then B, you're also probably not going to be objective about the decisions that you're doing.

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immediately in front of you because you're going to be so invested in that one frame of reference of yourself that you're not going to be willing to challenge it or question it in any way.

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Also, I think there are interestingly kind of two ways to really screw this up with your own heaven luck.

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I think one is to personally,

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properly assess all of the unfortunate things that you've had to deal with in your life without seeing the fortunate things that you've had in your life.

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So like just really narrowly focusing on all the bad shit that's happened to you and like not widening your perspective to include some of the better stuff.

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Conversely,

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You can also screw this up by taking credit for all of the good things that have happened to you and not acknowledging that a significant amount of it was due to luck.

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So it's like one version of this is, say, the unfortunate person who just feels zero agency and that the world has just screwed them over time and time again.

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But the other version of this is somebody who was born on third base and thinks they hit a triple.

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acknowledging your own fortune requires you to expand in both directions, if that makes sense.

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There's research on this gratitude stuff, too, that says this has to be grounded in some sort of reality.

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Right.

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And you're right.

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There's two ways that that can go get out of reality.

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You can you can you can assess it outside the bounds of reality.

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If you're going to be grateful about something, it does have to be grounded in some sort of fact of your life.

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Accurately, yes.

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But also too, like, yeah, you have to have a bias of like expanding that reference like we're talking about, that frame of reference.

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One thing that Buffett said too that I really like, and I've definitely felt this in my own life, is that he was giving a talk to MBA students about this topic, about the ovarian lottery.

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And he was explaining that like...

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Because he feels so fortunate to be who he is, he feels that gives him a sense of moral duty to give back and help others.

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It's not like, oh, I'm so fortunate.

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Let me just like party like a rock star and and.

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think I'm better than everybody.

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It's, it's actually quite the opposite.

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It's when you are aware of all the ways things could be worse.

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I think it makes you more compassionate and you feel more of, of a sense of duty to, to help those around you.

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And, and like, I realize I'm in, in such an insanely privileged position.

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Some of it I've earned.

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Some of it is just by pure chance and happenstance.

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Yeah.

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But because I'm here, I do feel some sort of obligation to do something with it.

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If I just sat around spending all my money, like watching football games and going to the pool, like I would feel fucking terrible about myself.

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It would feel like squandering such a blessed and incredible opportunity that I've been given.

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And so in a sense, I do think this widening of your aperture, expanding your frame of reference, considering all the possible alternatives that are worse than your current situation, not only does it make you more grateful for what you have, it makes you a more compassionate and giving person in general to the other people around you.

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There's another side to it too that some people will go to, which is extreme guilt around this.

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And that can also lead to like an action where it's like, well, I have all this, I'm not going to do anything with it because I have all this.

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I'm not going to, you know, go out and make more money that you could give away or, you know, something like that.

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So I think that's the right balance to strike is finding...

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You know, not partying your ass off versus, you know, being extremely guilty and not doing anything either.

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I start from a sense of guilt a lot of times, too.

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Like, oh, God, I got lucky here.

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Well, and a lot of people don't want to act on opportunities because they feel guilt.

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Well, it's not fair I have this opportunity.

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So I'm not going to take it.

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Right.

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Whereas I'm like, no, it's not fair for you to not take it.

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So to kind of bring this home, you know, people...

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who perceive themselves as lucky, as we've already discussed, they tend to report higher life satisfaction.

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They tend to be happier people.

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They tend to be more successful, see more opportunities.

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They just report better outcomes kind of across the board.

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There does seem to be a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect of this, which is that the more fortunate you feel, the more aware you are of alternative realities or alternative versions of your life, the more you feel,

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which then opens you up to seeing future opportunities.

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It makes you kind of more open-minded, more flexible in your thinking, which then allows you to take advantage of those future opportunities and excel even more and live an even better life.

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So heaven luck, even though we can't control it, even though it is all of the stuff that happens to us,

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What we can control is our perspective on it, how we view our circumstances, and what are the alternative circumstances that we can imagine for ourselves that we don't have.

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So while we can't change our heaven luck, we can change how we feel about our heaven luck.

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And it turns out that that actually matters as much, if not more, than what heaven luck we have in the first place.

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Hey everybody, that's it.

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The clip is over.

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This comes from The Solve Podcast.

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You can get the whole chapter and it's sitting right here.