There's a tale of a man who won the lottery and blew it all in five years. People roll their eyes at the cliché-Someone gets the opportunity of a lifetime and for some reason leans toward pissing it away.

But what is often missing from the story is a deeper question: Why do some people appear to capitalize on their good luck while others apparently let it slip through their fingers like sand?

Luck, we tell ourselves, is a matter of chance. An arbitrary wind that sweeps some to the front, leaving others behind. But luck, it turns out, is seldom the whole story.