a Christina snip
'Juanse, does this fit your description of "luck"?  Losses happen, then you figure out what happened and overcome the losses.  Now if no losses happen in the first place, aren't you better off?  This would seem like "luck" to me...either bad (first case) or good (second case)."

my comments.... 
A long time ago my academic and professional specialty was the study of economics and finance with a focus on risk and uncertainty.  A lot of the theory behind this field of study was derived from the laying of mine fields around port in the second world war by a man who as it turns out was known quite well by my father in law (one of several folks he would know thru his association with Stanford University that would go on to win the Nobel Prize).  Basically risk and uncertainty are commonly viewed as the same thing by the lay but are quite distinct from analysis point of view.  To cut to the chase here.... risk is anything you can define a probability distribution around and uncertainty is any event which is so rare that no distribution can be defined to describe just an event.

In the common language s**t happens and some folks do seem to know how to plan for unexpected results and to have prior constructed strategies for dealing with these speed bumps when they occur better than others.  Of course in my above definition risk is much easier to deal with than uncertainty but contingencies can be constructed to deal with both.

Therefore at least for me luck of the good or bad version is something you can plan for but sadly many do not.  

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