"I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn't been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn't have been lucky." Oprah Winprey
Is "luck" a genetic quality you can inherit? In many respects luck is not simply about winning the lottery (which is often only a transient luck), but more about the ability to recognize a lucky moment and take advantage of it. Many people have tales of great opportunities they missed or great love matches that failed to materialize. So maybe some people aren't so much "lucky" as simply able to take advantage of a moment in time.
Then there are the people whose ancestors were very successful (and lucky), who left them great riches or properties, the people who just look fantastic because they ancestors were very good looking. That is all a type of luck and also dependent on your ability to use that luck to grow in some way.
In a way, anybody who is healthy and has a decent family life is extremely lucky.
In Larry Niven's "Ring World", a science fiction story set in an overpopulated future, having children requires success in a lottery. "Teela Brown" is a fictional character descended from "six generations of winners of the lottery. Because of her luck she has led a charmed and worry-free life and is emotionally immature and unprepared for "harsh reality." See her Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Known_Space_characters#Teela_Brown.
A group of aliens come to earth to investigate an incredible man-made world they have discovered (a vast steel ring circling a sun). The aliens believe that Teela has been bred for luck and want her for their crew. As they find out, her luck is hers - it doesn't rub off.
I am lucky in the sense that I am one of the first members of my family in many generations, to live in a country where Jews are not discriminated against or regarded negatively (though this may not apply outside Israel). Beyond that, however, my very existence is the result of an extraordinary run of luck by my father who was given up for adoption after his father died and then admitted to Britain 3 days before the Nazi invitation of Poland, following a highly unusual (even more unusual in that it was successful) request in the British parliament that he be given a visa.
My father arrived in Britain at the age of 15 with no relatives, he eventually worked as a waiter in a private gamblers club, serving high-stakes poker players (a similar story became a movie, see https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2014/7/her-house-of-cards). The players thought he was lucky and gave him big tips which he used to finance drama studies at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts).
I am surrounded by people with similar tales of lucky survivals. My father-in-law was born in Poland and when the Nazis invaded, his father recognized a Nazi soldier he knew, who told him to get across the Vistula to Soviet occupied Poland. The whole family were sent to Siberia and were the only family in their camp who had no one die of starvation (his mother wrote on the personal details sheet that she was a cook and working in the kitchen meant extra food).
I have worked with people whose parents survived Nazi slave camps, passed through Auschwitz or had family members survive the Soviet Gulag. My mother-in-law's family decided to leave Belarus and migrate to Palestine after a family member was hospitalized by a beating. I don't know why two of my mother's grandparents left Lithuania in 1881 - a year of severe pogroms, but 98% of Lithuanian Jews were murdered 60 years later, so in that sense they were lucky.
There were also all the Jews who chose to leave Iraq, Yemen, Iran or Ethiopia. Are they lucky? Well, most are definitely better off here then they would be there, but again, its what you do with the opportunity that counts, not the luck itself.
Were all these Jews lucky? Can that luck be inherited? It is funny how all the missiles fired at Israel seem to miss most people and it made me wonder, but I know that luck is almost always also dependent on what you do with it, or as Oprah said, being prepared. The vast majority of Israelis sat in their shelters although the chances of being hit by a missile were quite small. Take luck for granted and it will vanish or reverse. If Israelis were lucky, it was because they took precautions.
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