“Do you consider yourself lucky?”
I’m often asked after giving speeches on leadership to students. I’m not entirely sure why they’re so interested in the concept or what they expect my answer to be. Perhaps they want to surrender their future to luck or use it as a reason for why some people succeed and others don’t.
I’m also not entirely sure what I really believe about luck. I find an indescribable comfort in the notion, but whether I think it’s real or I’m just drawn to its mystical nature, I can’t be sure. Either way, when students ask, I am confident of my answer: Yes, I do consider myself to be lucky, but you should never surrender to luck.
Luck doesn’t serendipitously appear to people who are lounging around in waiting mode. While success may seem to appear by chance, it actually comes from being prepared. You need to be ready so that when Lady Luck appears, you don’t waste the opportunity by sitting back and letting something you conveniently call destiny run its course.
Preparation comes from visualising what you want and working hard to make it reality. In fact, a highlight for me each week is spending a few hours in the pool thinking about the things I want to achieve — the specifics of what I plan to accomplish.
Long before I learnt that this was called visualisation, my dad taught me to see the shot. “See it go into the basket,” he’d tell me as I prepared to shoot the ball in training when I was a kid. This practice bled into every other sport I played: see the bat hitting the ball before you swing, see the ball going through the goalposts before you kick it.
I doubt my dad understood it at the time, but he was teaching me a lifelong habit: the practice of seeing what I want even before working for it. In essence, this is the law of attraction — the belief that focusing your thoughts can bring ambitions to life.
But “seeing the shot” is only one element of preparation, the other is hard work. You have to work for what you want, otherwise visualising success is nothing more than a daydream. Luck doesn’t show up following wishful thinking.
If it did, the world would be full of people who succeeded simply by visualising from the pool over the weekend, without showing up at the office at the start of the week.
It’s not just about being prepared, however. In the pursuit of luck, the wingman of preparation is persistence. It’s tempting to resign to being unlucky because the things you wish for don’t fall immediately into your lap, but don’t give up — you have to persist.
You have to knock on the door, then knock again. And if there’s no answer, you need to try the window.
Persistence is a characteristic of people who refuse to accept no for an answer — those who understand that no doesn’t mean never, it merely means not now. Don’t give up because you made the mistake of confusing the two.
One of the greatest basketball players of all-time, Larry Bird, repeatedly said, “I find the harder I work, the luckier I get.” This quote was originally from Thomas Jefferson and has been repeated by multiple other champions, including golf legend Arnold Palmer. These champions understand that Lady Luck is rarely found along the easy road. She doesn’t show up for those who sit on the sofa, so put yourself where luck resides and provoke it to find you.
Whether luck is a state of mind or a mystical orientation, you need to be prepared, persistent and present for it to strike. The comfort of feeling lucky will only be found when you make the effort to seek it out and stand ready for the moment when your stars align.
Sometimes luck can feel elusive, but with the right approach, we can each make our own.
— Tommy Weir is a CEO coach and author of “Leadership Dubai Style”. Contact him at tsw@tommyweir.com.
