text: Generally, my eyes glaze over as I reach chapter 3 of most business books as they provide the mastery of the intuitively obvious. Make Your Own Luck by Shapiro and Stevenson has broken the pattern. Written in punchy conversational style, the book is a delightful combination of anecdotes and useful tools geared to help the reader up the odds in personal and business decision-making. The process of setting goals and assessing risk is broken down into discrete aspects, allowing the reader to assess his own patterns of success and failure. This sounds as if it could be tedious, but it's not. The authors know you are not sitting in a policy course. They know that you make numerous bets in any given day and do it most of the time without focusing on the decision as a bet. The book makes you conscious of those bets and gives you the groundwork to move through those bets with speed and focus. In managing investments, I'm betting on a gestalt of macro economic factors and company specific performance as well as betting on the actions of other investors. The tools in Make Your Own Luck, such as the Prediction Map, are completely applicable to the inferential analysis I use in managing investments as well as life's major problems, such as how to seat guests at the next dinner party. This book is a good read. Shapiro and Stevenson incorporate topics from baseball to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Make Your Own Luck makes you laugh, makes your think and gives you tools to improve your own lot. 
  