"For more than a decade, my work has focused on serendipity, the process through which people turn unexpected events into positive outcomes. But that work has also made me aware of its dark counterpart: zemblanity. Novelist William Boyd introduced the term as the opposite of serendipity, describing the tendency to make unhappy discoveries by design."
"The Oxford English Dictionary defines luck as 'the chance occurrence of situations or events either favourable or unfavourable to a person's interests.' This traditional understanding captures two familiar types of luck: good luck, something unexpectedly positive that we did not influence, and bad luck, something negative that happens randomly, outside our control."
"One way to explore this dynamic is through what I call the luck matrix. It looks at unintended outcomes along two dimensions: whether they create positive or negative value, and whether human agency played a meaningful role in shaping them. In this framework, there are essentially four types of luck."
Luck traditionally refers to random favorable or unfavorable events beyond human control. However, research reveals two additional forms where human agency plays a significant role: serendipity and zemblanity. Serendipity occurs when people create positive value by engaging constructively with unexpected events. Zemblanity, the opposite concept, describes the tendency to make unhappy discoveries through structural misfortune rather than pure accident. A luck matrix framework categorizes outcomes along two dimensions: whether they create positive or negative value, and whether human agency meaningfully influenced them. This creates four distinct types of luck, expanding understanding beyond passive chance occurrences to include active human participation in shaping outcomes.
Read at Psychology Today
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