Luck making requires both giving and reaching out -- the perfect throw -- and receiving -- catching the boomerang when it returns. If you only give, but don't allow yourself to receive, it's as if you threw the boomerang as far as you could but it never returned to you. That's not considered a successful boomerang. 

The great satisfaction of throwing a boomerang is watching it return to your hand after being released. First throw, then receive. Give and take, in equal measure. That's what making luck is all about. Think about it for a moment -- what is luck, really, but receiving a blessing of some kind. If you can't receive you are "out of luck." And where do so many of our blessings come from? From giving.

When you help someone, you often won't know in that moment how your actions will eventually translate into luck for yourself. Like throwing a pebble into a pond, your energy ripples out, touching hundreds of lives. Precisely where your luck will arise from, no one really knows -- until it happens.

If you are shortsighted, you might say of some altruistic act – "Why should I do that? What good is it going to do me?" Imagine you are given a script for a screenplay. It's a twisted plot that leaves the audience wondering how it is going to turn out for its main characters. Eventually, like any good story, it all comes together; the audience is delighted when the events in the first act set the stage for the drama in the second act, which is then resolved in the third act. There may even be a surprise ending that no one saw coming.

If, in your life, all you can see is the first act, you lack faith and vision that by the second and third acts you will understand how this output of energy will benefit you. Luck unfolds in mysterious ways. It isn't always for you to know at the beginning. It often isn't tit for tat, an even trade -- "I do this for you, and then you do this for me."

It may be more like this:

You take the time to give some free business advice. In the course of your conversation, the person you are helping learns that you are serious about playing badminton, because you use the game as a metaphor for something you explain. You end the conversation in 15 minutes and don't stay in touch.

Six months later the person you helped re-contacts you, to introduce you to a new friend of his who is also into badminton. He gives you her phone number and you call her. She tells you that she is part of an online chat group for people who are serious about improving their badminton game. She encourages you to join up, and you do. A year later, you meet a really interesting [person] in the chat room. You begin sharing badminton stories and tips, and it progresses from there. You fall in love and get married.

The chain of events that led to marriage started with an altruistic act for someone who doesn't play badminton and doesn't even know the person you end up marrying. The person who has been helped feels indebted, and when he meets someone with the same unusual hobby several months later, he is delighted to repay the debt by bringing the two badminton aficionados together. The rest, as they say, is history.

If you were single, and you received a phone call asking for business advice, and you could see into the future that extending yourself would eventually lead to the perfect mate, you might be even more enthusiastic about giving what was needed.

The trick to luck-making is that you have to give of yourself without that crystal ball -- not knowing how or if luck will come back to you, but trusting that if you are a kind, helpful person, like the boomerang, blessings will eventually return to you.