In almost everything we accomplish in life, there are three contributing factors to our success – the work we put into achieving the thing, the intelligence and creativity we apply in pursuit of our goal, and the blind fortune of dumb luck. Most of us spend most of our time thinking about how to improve our chances of success by working better or smarter, since luck is generally seen as something we can’t do anything about. But there are ways to think about luck that can actually be helpful in improving our overall quality of life.
Before we get into that, though, I think it’s rather important to point out that these same three factors are also present whenever we fail at something. Sometimes it’s because we didn’t put enough work into achieving the thing we were trying to achieve; sometimes we weren’t sufficiently intelligent or creative in our approach; and sometimes luck worked against us. Which means that thinking about luck can not only help us during our successful times, but also during our unsuccessful ones as well.
So let’s start with success. In general, successful people usually attribute the vast majority of their success either to their hard work or their creativity and intelligence. Luck is usually mentioned in passing, if it is mentioned at all. But luck plays an equally important part as hard work and intelligence. You are the beneficiary of good luck if you were born in a stable country that hasn’t been torn apart by war or corruption, or if your parents were loving and attentive, or if you had teachers who understood and inspired you, or if you were raised with the resources to try a lot of different things to figure out what really interested you. I do not mean to suggest that luck is the only or primary reason that successful people are successful. I do, however, mean to suggest that no successful person ever achieves success entirely, strictly, 100% through hard work, creativity, and intelligence.
The same is true when we fail. Sometimes we fail because we don’t try hard enough, and sometimes we fail because we have bad ideas or can’t figure out how to solve whatever problems we’re facing. But sometimes we fail because we don’t have a good support network, or because we can’t get access to capital because we don’t know the right people, or because we happen to live in a place with few opportunities – and when that happens, our failure is as much a product of bad luck as it is anything else.
The pandemic is a phenomenal example of the impact of luck on our lives. The businesses that came out of the pandemic strong and robust and with record-breaking profits do not deserve all the credit for their success; and the ones that failed during the pandemic absolutely do not deserve all the blame for their failures. If you happen to disagree with that and think that the pandemic was some kind of righteous Sorting Hat that separated natural winners from inevitable losers, then not only do I think you’re completely wrong, but I also think you’re being rather uncharitable.
And that’s the real lesson I think we can take away from analyzing the role of luck in our lives. Every one of our successes in life is the result of at least some amount of good luck; and when you realize that, it makes you both more gracious in success and empathetic to those who haven’t achieved the same. And luck plays a part in every one of our failures, too – and when you acknowledge that, you’ll beat yourself up a little less.
Everyone knows that good luck is helpful. And I certainly believe that hard work, creative thought, and a healthy support network can help mitigate the negative impact of bad luck, even if it can’t eliminate that negative impact entirely. But simply recognizing the role that luck plays in our lives will make you a kinder human, both to yourself and to others, than pretending that it doesn’t exist.
Thanks for reading this. Given that there were plenty of other things you could be doing right now, I suppose it’s at least a little bit lucky that you decided to take the time to do it.
