the.com/blind luck
the universe's way of rewarding the unqualified before the talented can object.
means Success or good fortune that arrives purely by chance, with no skill, planning, or merit behind it.
from A pairing of two old English words. 'Luck' is the latecomer, slipping into English in the late Middle Ages, probably from a Low German or Dutch gambling term (compare Dutch 'geluk', German 'Glück') — a word that rode in on the backs of card players and dice-throwers. 'Blind' is the ancient native one, going back to Old English 'blind' for sightless. Welding 'blind' to a noun to mean 'happening without sight, guidance, or reason' is a long-standing English habit — think 'blind chance' and 'blind faith' — so 'blind luck' simply names fortune stumbling in with its eyes shut, hitting the right person by pure accident.
- coin myth
- Fair coins favor whichever side started up about 51%.
- lottery odds
- You're likelier to be struck by lightning, twice.
- survivorship bias
- We only hear from luck's winners, never its silent losers.
- penicillin
- A contaminated petri dish accidentally launched modern antibiotics.
- word origin
- Luck entered English from Dutch gamblers around the 1400s.
hitting powerball jackpot — 1 in 292 million odds, yet someone wins roughly every 3 months in the us
finding the titanic wreck — robert ballard located it in 1985 after searching 96 square miles of atlantic floor at 12,500 feet depth
penicillin discovery — alexander fleming returned from vacation in 1928 to find mold contaminating his bacterial culture by chance