Good Luck. Bad Luck. Do You Even Know the Difference?

They say bad luck is better than no luck at all.

It’s an old story.

Maybe as old as the fourth century BC, back when people knew so much less so much more deeply than we do now. When the quiet contemplation of a meadow sloping down to a chuckling stream could teach you everything you needed to know about the world.

We don’t know for sure who wrote it down. And so I’m free to steal it and put it behind a paywall, as though it belonged to me. I may not be honest, but at least I’m honest about it.

When the farmer’s horse ran away, his neighbors clucked their tongues and shook their heads in sympathy. “Bad luck,” they said. “Such bad luck.”

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

But that night, his horse came home in an exultation of wild neighing, bringing with it three wild horses from the surrounding forest. By chance, the farmer was now far richer than he had ever been before.

“What luck!” said his neighbors.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

Of course, horses are worthless until you break them. And when the farmer’s eldest son climbed onto the back of one of the previously wild horses, it threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. “What a shame,” said the neighbors.

“Maybe.”

The next day, government officials came to the village to round up all the young men for military service. Lying in bed with a broken leg, the farmer’s son was exempt. “So it all worked out for the best,” the neighbors said.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

P.G. Barnett wrote this article about what he describes as ‘the theory of opposite luck.’ He talks about the difference between what you want and what you need, and how your failure to fulfill your desires may be the best thing for you.

The trouble is, none of us can see the end of the path once we’re standing on it. And none of us get to see where the road we didn’t take would have led us. The best way I’ve found to live your life is in pursuit of your dreams, but there’s no guarantee you will achieve them. No amount of desire is enough. And hard work, while necessary, is not sufficient.

Like PG, I’ve spent my life wanting to be a writer. And working on it, too. In a way, I’ve achieved it. But only in a way.

The writing that supports me doesn’t come anywhere near my heart, and the words that boil inside me fade almost instantly into silence when I release them into the world. By day, I churn out copy that gets clicks but leaves me empty. At night, I don’t write for anyone but myself. But at its heart, ultimately, writing is about communication. If it wasn’t, none of us would be here.

So I’ve been sharpening my pen for decades, in parks and in pubs, in bedrooms and on balconies. I’ve scored the folding tabletops of half the trains in Italy with the repulsive loops and whorls of my tangled handwriting. I’ve spent my adult life tugging at the sleeve of public consciousness, hoping you would see me. But here I am, dictating these words into the wind and knowing they’ll earn me nothing.

As P.G. Barnett points out, it’s hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re whining. I’m not. Because while I was steering my life in a direction I chose when I was too young to remember choosing, other things happened. Good things.

I was a penniless immigrant to Canada when I was twenty and was buying an apartment in one of the world’s hottest real estate markets at twenty-six. At twenty-eight, I started my own business, and unlike the majority of small businesses, it didn’t fail. It thrived.

And while the day-to-day drudgery of running a million dollar a year company left me cold (trust me, it’s not as much as it sounds), I’m well aware that for many people, successful self-employment is an unattainable dream.

But it wasn’t my dream. And so I sold my company and went to live in France and Italy for a while, accompanied by the wife I met and married along the way. Lasting love. Financial stability. Good health. Adventure. These are the fundamental building blocks of a fulfilling life, and by pure dumb luck, I have them all.

I’m not superstitious.

I don’t believe the universe cares about us, and the heavens above are too beautiful to harbor a God. There’s no law of attraction, no Secret, no question of deserving or undeserving. I’ve worked for the life I have, but I’ve failed too often to believe for a moment that hard work is enough. I’ve come a long way in a short time. My next adventure, if I can pull it off, is to buy a home in cash and be mortgage-free before I’m 40.

It’s not that I don’t deserve it. It’s just that everybody else deserves it, too.

I’m not bragging any more than I’m whining. I’m only listing my achievements to remind myself. And to demonstrate how little they mean. Not that I’m not grateful for what I have. But according to Barnett’s Theory of Opposite Luck, I have everything I never wanted, and not what I was truly after.

Maybe.

I’ve written before about how dreams look different close up.

Maybe the life you’re living today is the one you dreamed of yesterday. As I sit in the garden sipping some nonsense, watching the sun catch its toe in the crags of the mountains, I’m living a life far easier and more pleasurable and freer than any I could’ve imagined for myself when I was growing up.

If human beings were capable of real gratitude, these mountains would never have heard our voices. The moon would be clean and bare and flagless, and atoms would remain unseen and unsplit. Maybe that’s better. Maybe not. If the law of opposite luck demonstrates anything, it’s that we can’t determine good from bad until the story is finally over.

May all your dreams but one come true. The line is ordinarily attributed to David Gemmell, which only goes to prove that even an absolute hack is capable of insight. Life is nothing without dreams.

And the goal-oriented existence I’ve lived so far has revealed that the biggest danger I face is getting too much of what I want. For people with minds like mine, it’s possible to get so far ahead that we think we’re behind.

For PG and for me, the lesson is clear. Our inability to achieve what we most wanted is the fuel for the engine that brought us everything we have. We’re trying to capture the stars, and in doing so, we’ve been gifted with infinite light. We are lucky, all of us dreamers are lucky, to have that goal, that high and wild prize glittering forever in front of us. Because without it, we would have nowhere left to go.

Besides, it’s not over yet. Me and PG and every other writer are going to keep doing this until our pens fall like stars from our lifeless fingers. By the time we’ve finally, definitely failed, we won’t even know it. What better dream could there be than that?