Steve L. Edwards

 Tell me if any of this rings a bell:

• When sitting in traffic, you always seem to be in the slow lane.
• When standing in the checkout line, yours always seems to have the most people in it.
• You have a friend that’s won a couple hundred dollars with scratch-off lottery tickets, but you’ve never won more than a buck or so.
• You’re a writer, reading about writers getting published, but so far not only have you not been picked up, but you keep getting form rejection letters (if any response at all).

Based on the reasoning of Clayton Caston, the dour CIA statistician in Robert Ludlum’s book “Ambler Warning”, you were able to relate to many, if not all of the above.

Would you believe that has nothing to do with you just being an “unlucky” person?

I really love it when I’m reading a fun book like “Ambler Warning” and I stumble across a nugget of wisdom that makes me stop and think. When I read this particular one, I had to share it.

The reason so many of those hypotheticals seemed familiar to you, is due to something called the “observation selection effect”. As Ludlum explains through his character Caston, there are a certain number of people in check-out lines at the store. Because the longest line has more people in it, it is statistically more probable that ANY person checking out will be in that line. It’s not a matter of luck, it’s a matter of probabilities.

The same inference holds true on the the other situations as well. You see your friend as luckier than you are because he/she has a winning scratch-off ticket, but that’s only because you haven’t observed that they actually play the lottery way more than you do. In most cases they only seem luckier because they skewed the odds of a winning ticket by purchasing way more than you did (and in order for the lottery to make as much money as it does, in most cases those winners have lost much more than they’ve won).

So what did I take home from all of this?

There are a large number of us out here that are writers. Those of us that are beginners and are in search of agents far outnumber those who have found one and sold their novel profitably. The fact that we see others getting the contract, but not us, isn’t because we’re unlucky. To paraphrase Ludlum, The laws of probability say that any given writer is more likely to be in our category than in the other.

Don’t get discouraged and think if only you could get a lucky break, you’d have a best seller. Be like your lottery winning friend, and skew the odds in your favor. Keep putting yourself out there, in as many ways as possible. The more rejections you get, the more times you’ve tried. The more times you try, the closer you get to your goal.

Make your own luck. As Machiavelli said in “The Prince”: “…he who has relied least on fortune is established the strongest.”

Oh yeah, and Good Luck!