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Abstract

and that I didn’t need to worry about preparing for the rest of my major. This wasn’t about my luck running out. This was about my assumption that I could just coast on through the rest of my courses.If our definition of luck is, as Seneca says, the intersection of preparation and opportunity, than it doesn’t allow room for excuses — particularly when it comes to other people.My father is one half of a consulting company that raises capital for relatively new companies, most of which are in the medical industry. His meetings with venture capitalists around the country have resulted in hundreds of millions in capital for his company’s clients. His biggest client is a company called Invoy, whose product is used by Miami Children’s Hospital, sports teams, and, more recently, a worldwide financial company.Is he lucky? He doesn’t think so. Maybe divine intervention provided the opportunity, but it was definitely opportunity. Combined with ongoing preparation. And a lot of starting over after losing everything.A little over a decade ago, Dad owned four car dealerships, two vacation condos, a boat, and various investment properties. He was also on the board of, and owned stock in, a banking institution in Georgia. By the time the recession was over, he had short-sold everything that hadn’t gone into foreclosure, and all of his stock was worthless. And it got worse. His daughter seemingly went insane after her marriage fell apart. He got sued. The people he’d convinced to buy shares of the now-worthless stock — including his own mother — lost their retirement money. He lost friends and family members.His life absolutely sucked.So, at age sixty, Dad picked himself up and started over with less than nothing. Less than he’d had when he was in college. Mom went back to work so they’d have at least one steady income. They struggled to pay the mortgage. He and an old friend started their consulting company, but it’s never easy getting off the ground when it comes to selling venture capitalists on the idea of handing their money to small pharmaceutical companies and a company that created a breathalyzer for medical purposes.The opportunity arrived as slowly as a snail. But when it finally started showing up in the horizon, he was prepared. And now — finally — his hard work is starting to pay off.Assuming that someone just lucked out is, in my opinion, a form of denial. This belief keeps us from recognizing that the majority of people who have succeeded at whatever — school, relationship, job, anything — probably got there by working their asses off to turn opportunity into a success.Social media makes it easier than ever to believe that luck is the only explanation for someone’s success. That mindset prevents us from recognizing that we are only seeing a snapshot of someone’s life. If we were to observe that person’s life on video, we’d likely see the struggles, the failures, and the dead ends, as well as the things they lost or gave up in order to get whatever you see in that snapshot. We’d see frustration. W

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e’d probably see tears.But it takes less brain power to just be pissed at them and keep scrolling.Since our definition of luck tends to dictate that a lucky person did nothing to get ahead, an unlucky person can also do nothing to get ahead. The lucky person just randomly won, and the unlucky person just randomly lost.The continuous feeling that you haven’t been blessed by the gods of luck does a few things to warp your mind.It can limit or prevent you from being able to think outside the box.It can keep you from being inspired by people who succeed.It can cause you to think in absolutes: lucky people seem to have it all, and unlucky people — like you — don’t.So how do we go about changing our perspective of luck into something that looks more like Seneca’s definition?This is what has worked for me:<h2 id="75b0">Enjoy the small victories.</h2>Success doesn’t have to be something big. And it may not end up with something big. Getting your kid to sleep in their own bed. Making your first omelet that actually looks like an omelet. Running your first mile. Making $.03 on your Medium story. All of these are successes, and they should be savored. You took an opportunity to make or practice something, and you succeeded.<h2 id="8036">Be inspired by successful people.</h2>Seeing someone else’s success as a threat or a reason to feel sorry for yourself is not going to achieve much of anything. I follow a lot of very successful Medium writers. It’s really hard to not be envious of a person who makes hundreds of dollars per day writing stories, but sitting there wishing for the same success does literally nothing to help my own cause. Success didn’t just fall into these people’s laps. It would be insulting for me to assume that of people who have worked hard, regularly, often for years. So I’ve chosen to be inspired by them, which involves reading their stories regularly, especially the ones about the long road to writing well.<h2 id="d813">Part of preparing for success is preparing for failure along the way.</h2>You’ll have plenty of opportunities to fail. I didn’t just magically know how to ski. Or surf. Or jump a horse over obstacles. I spent plenty of time tumbling down slopes, cutting my feet and legs after skidding on underwater rocks while wiping out, landing onto jumps, and going to competitions and getting last place. I’ve spent hours writing stories that flopped, and no story I’ve written has taken off at all. I don’t like it, but I’ve accepted that failure is pretty much necessary for success to happen.The takeaway here is to train your brain to see the idea of luck as the good Roman philosopher saw it. Viewing success from his perspective doesn’t allow room for dismissal. It allows you to remember that a successful person put some level of work into making an opportunity turn into a favorable outcome.And when your time comes to succeed at something, you can remind yourself that it wasn’t just dumb luck.</article></body>

Stop Thinking That Successful People Are Just Lucky

And that you’re not.

I first got lucky in college when I scored an A in Psych 101. The professor was on academic probation and graded on a curve.

Then another psychology professor also happened to be on probation, and I got another A in a difficult course. Luck was on my side. Right?

So I changed my major to psychology.

Because I hadn’t done well despite my efforts at the previous university I had attended prior to transferring to the University of Georgia, I figured that my success in these two classes was a stroke of good luck. So I rode the wave of my fake success and didn’t take any opportunity to do things like researching possible internships and looking into what it took to do well on the GRE for my next round of education in the field.

My luck ran out when I started taking required courses, taught by people who weren’t on any kind of probation. One day, as I shocked huge earthworms in a lab for a really weird course, I wondered if changing my major had been such a great idea.

By the end of my senior year, my confidence in my ability to learn in this field had taken a serious dive. I never did take the GRE.

A few years ago, an acquaintance of ours posted a YouTube video about how to make a WordPress website and got 500k views straight out of the gate.

He got so much money from that one video that he quit his office job and enjoyed life on a passive income.

Because he’d lucked out on his first-ever YouTube video, he dragged his feet on making another one. For two years. Like me, he was riding the wave of luck and figured that he’d also bank on the next video. As such, he did zero research on updates to WordPress, and he didn’t even consider any possible competition out there.

When the views on his first video plummeted due to the growing number of other videos with better content, he finally got around to posting his second video.

That was in 2018. As of today, his second video has 2500 views. His luck had clearly run out.

Or had it? Was luck even involved in these two examples?

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” — Seneca, Roman philosopher

With both me and the YouTube guy, the opportunity was there at the start, and we grabbed it by the tail and hung on. But because we both we failed to prepare and keep a good thing going, our initial success didn’t turn into continued success. I can’t speak for him, but I know that I’d considered myself lucky, that I’d deserved such luck, and that I didn’t need to worry about preparing for the rest of my major. This wasn’t about my luck running out. This was about my assumption that I could just coast on through the rest of my courses.

If our definition of luck is, as Seneca says, the intersection of preparation and opportunity, than it doesn’t allow room for excuses — particularly when it comes to other people.

My father is one half of a consulting company that raises capital for relatively new companies, most of which are in the medical industry. His meetings with venture capitalists around the country have resulted in hundreds of millions in capital for his company’s clients. His biggest client is a company called Invoy, whose product is used by Miami Children’s Hospital, sports teams, and, more recently, a worldwide financial company.

Is he lucky? He doesn’t think so. Maybe divine intervention provided the opportunity, but it was definitely opportunity. Combined with ongoing preparation. And a lot of starting over after losing everything.

A little over a decade ago, Dad owned four car dealerships, two vacation condos, a boat, and various investment properties. He was also on the board of, and owned stock in, a banking institution in Georgia. By the time the recession was over, he had short-sold everything that hadn’t gone into foreclosure, and all of his stock was worthless. And it got worse. His daughter seemingly went insane after her marriage fell apart. He got sued. The people he’d convinced to buy shares of the now-worthless stock — including his own mother — lost their retirement money. He lost friends and family members.

His life absolutely sucked.

So, at age sixty, Dad picked himself up and started over with less than nothing. Less than he’d had when he was in college. Mom went back to work so they’d have at least one steady income. They struggled to pay the mortgage. He and an old friend started their consulting company, but it’s never easy getting off the ground when it comes to selling venture capitalists on the idea of handing their money to small pharmaceutical companies and a company that created a breathalyzer for medical purposes.

The opportunity arrived as slowly as a snail. But when it finally started showing up in the horizon, he was prepared. And now — finally — his hard work is starting to pay off.

Assuming that someone just lucked out is, in my opinion, a form of denial. This belief keeps us from recognizing that the majority of people who have succeeded at whatever — school, relationship, job, anything — probably got there by working their asses off to turn opportunity into a success.

Social media makes it easier than ever to believe that luck is the only explanation for someone’s success. That mindset prevents us from recognizing that we are only seeing a snapshot of someone’s life. If we were to observe that person’s life on video, we’d likely see the struggles, the failures, and the dead ends, as well as the things they lost or gave up in order to get whatever you see in that snapshot. We’d see frustration. We’d probably see tears.

But it takes less brain power to just be pissed at them and keep scrolling.

Since our definition of luck tends to dictate that a lucky person did nothing to get ahead, an unlucky person can also do nothing to get ahead. The lucky person just randomly won, and the unlucky person just randomly lost.

The continuous feeling that you haven’t been blessed by the gods of luck does a few things to warp your mind.

It can limit or prevent you from being able to think outside the box.

It can keep you from being inspired by people who succeed.

It can cause you to think in absolutes: lucky people seem to have it all, and unlucky people — like you — don’t.

So how do we go about changing our perspective of luck into something that looks more like Seneca’s definition?

This is what has worked for me:

Enjoy the small victories.

Success doesn’t have to be something big. And it may not end up with something big. Getting your kid to sleep in their own bed. Making your first omelet that actually looks like an omelet. Running your first mile. Making $.03 on your Medium story. All of these are successes, and they should be savored. You took an opportunity to make or practice something, and you succeeded.

Be inspired by successful people.

Seeing someone else’s success as a threat or a reason to feel sorry for yourself is not going to achieve much of anything. I follow a lot of very successful Medium writers. It’s really hard to not be envious of a person who makes hundreds of dollars per day writing stories, but sitting there wishing for the same success does literally nothing to help my own cause. Success didn’t just fall into these people’s laps. It would be insulting for me to assume that of people who have worked hard, regularly, often for years. So I’ve chosen to be inspired by them, which involves reading their stories regularly, especially the ones about the long road to writing well.

Part of preparing for success is preparing for failure along the way.

You’ll have plenty of opportunities to fail. I didn’t just magically know how to ski. Or surf. Or jump a horse over obstacles. I spent plenty of time tumbling down slopes, cutting my feet and legs after skidding on underwater rocks while wiping out, landing onto jumps, and going to competitions and getting last place. I’ve spent hours writing stories that flopped, and no story I’ve written has taken off at all. I don’t like it, but I’ve accepted that failure is pretty much necessary for success to happen.

The takeaway here is to train your brain to see the idea of luck as the good Roman philosopher saw it. Viewing success from his perspective doesn’t allow room for dismissal. It allows you to remember that a successful person put some level of work into making an opportunity turn into a favorable outcome.

And when your time comes to succeed at something, you can remind yourself that it wasn’t just dumb luck.