I don’t believe in luck. I believe in effort and hard work to reach a goal. When someone has succeeded, luck has rarely had anything to do with it. But I am an absolute believer in bad luck, because it can turn up at any moment.
Bad luck is having a job interview, leaving with plenty of time to spare, and ending up unconscious in hospital after an accident on the way. Without that accident, you would probably have had the “luck” of being hired as the best person for the job.
Bad luck would be starting a business and, once you have bought your stock, having a meteorite land on your premises, only to find out that insurance companies don’t cover natural disasters (an exaggerated example, but an act of bad luck).
By bad luck we mean an athlete who has spent years preparing for a championship breaking a bone a few days before and being unable to compete, having lost years of training for absolutely nothing. And there is nothing they can do, because nobody was to blame.
These are extreme cases, as extreme as succeeding thanks to good luck, but it is very true that some people have many advantages over us that they have done nothing to earn, while we have to make an extra effort just to draw level with our competitor. (Read: 6 advantages other people can unfairly have over us that we can do nothing to prevent.)
Effort is not everything.
Sometimes effort and hard work are not everything. To succeed, you sometimes need a degree of willpower greater than that of the people competing against you. Many people are not lazier than others; they simply face more obstacles all the time, and the effort they have to make comes close to a sentence, forcing them to sacrifice many other things.
See also: The parable of success: the gold prospector
Imagine that, starting tomorrow, you set yourself the goal of losing a few kilos by running. For a long time you have been making excuses not to go running, but tomorrow those excuses end.
The alarm goes off, you look out of the window and see that it is raining and bitterly cold. At that moment you start negotiating with yourself, putting the run off to another day with better weather.
For a professional runner, a rainy day is just another day. He already has that discipline, because he is a runner, not an aspiring runner.
If you ask that runner, he will tell you the steps you need to follow to become like him, and some of those steps are not about becoming a runner but about becoming a disciplined person. That veteran runner starts with an advantage over you: what is willpower for you is routine for him. So in your case, everything starts with extra willpower. And that is not negotiable: either you have more willpower than that person, or you will never achieve what that person has achieved. Accept it.
Talent is not everything.
Imagine two people with the same talent and the same motivation who live in two different parts of a country. Both decide they want to become great runners.
A few years later, one of them has become an excellent runner while the other has given up. At first sight, one of them worked hard while the other got lazy. The first didn’t have luck on his side, so what happened to the second?
The one who quit lived in a city hit by a tremendous cold wave, so it took enormous willpower to go out running, whereas his friend enjoyed splendid weather that made running very inviting.
People say the first became a great runner because he made an effort, worked hard and stayed motivated, when the truth is that if the situations had been reversed, the roles would probably have been reversed too, and he would have given up just as our second runner did.
How do you fight this “bad luck”?
The first thing some people have to accept is that they will need more willpower than others, as well as more effort and more self-acquired discipline: the discipline that comes before you are really disciplined. This is what is called “fake it till you make it”.
In the runners example, the truth is that both saw themselves as runners and had the same motivation. It’s just that one ran into an obstacle that derailed his plans while the other met no obstacle at all.
He didn’t have luck; he had an absence of bad luck, which in the end is what struck the runner who ran into the cold wave. It could have been a fracture or something worse. If that cold wave had never come, both would be great runners.
When we pursue a goal, we have to treat obstacles as what they are (obstacles, full stop), and those obstacles cannot be allowed to knock us off course.
(Read: 4 successful people who overcame their limitations)
Applied to the professional or business world, the runner who stays home because of the cold wave really ought to go out running even if his lungs freeze. We will curse the disadvantage we have compared with the other runner training in good weather, but it is also true that our hard training is building up calluses. Over time, in competition, having trained harder and having had to make a much greater effort than our competitor will make us more capable than him.
That should be the motivation with which we look at the unfair disadvantage caused by bad luck: in these cases our success is worth much more, our experiences are richer, and so our lessons can be more complete.
Many young people are born into wealthy families, and one day all they will have to do is apply a business lesson they learned at university to increase sales at their father’s company by 20%. Society will call them a genius and a great businessperson worthy of their father.
Meanwhile you, coming from a humble family, will have to work much harder than that person who inherited the management seat their father left them.
And for you there are no cold waves or heat waves. You can’t afford them. There are only days, some better and some worse, and those days cannot change your mood or affect your willpower. Your only allies in competing against that advantage are work, effort, tremendous willpower, and the calluses that will turn obstacles into your comfort zone.
It sucks, but it is the only secret to fighting bad luck.
Further reading
- How to avoid wearing down your willpower and decision-making
- 6 reasons we fail to keep our resolutions
- 8 beliefs of successful people in business
Featured image: planetary_nebula, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
