Luck: How You Look at Things

How many times have we heard that a person is lucky because they have a thriving business? Or they are lucky because they have a good career. Or in university they were lucky because they got good grades and we think they did it without studying hard. Often, we see others as possessing luck that we might not realize we, ourselves, have.

Part of the typical narrative about luck, especially when it comes to business or career, is that someone was, “in the right place, at the right time.” Now, I believe that, at times, random circumstance can be at the root of someone’s good fortune. So too, random circumstance can have a strong negative impact on an individual’s life. We call that bad luck.

However, random circumstance is only a part of luck. We can have all kinds of positive and negative circumstances come our way. What, in large part, can transform these circumstances into luck itself is the way in which we look at things.

The old expression, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” is well worth remembering. How many times do we perceive something as bad luck when, if we utilized a bit of creative thinking that supposed bad luck could be turned into good luck instead?

You see, often, luck is based on how we look at things. While we do not control random circumstance, we control how we react to random circumstance. If we look at what life dishes out as a series of teaching lessons, then we can choose to be careful students of those lessons. We can take bad luck and turn it into good luck by learning something from the experience.

In business, as long as we are willing to learn and improve, we increase our odds of becoming lucky. Success comes as the result of not only of directed effort, but of learning and adapting as we proceed to our goal. This learning helps us contextualize random circumstance in such as way as to yield that thing we call luck.

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You can reach me with your questions and comments at Jay@CYinterview.com