Does luck govern your venture, life or business success?

People who are successful sometimes underestimate the amount of luck and people who are not successful tend to overestimate the involvement of luck.

The truth is that everyone wants to be insanely successful in their pursuits, whatever they may be. Not in one, but in all spheres of life. Rather than complicating stuff let’s examine it from a single dimension, the perspective of wealth.

People who are unsuccessful underestimate the amount of hard work that went in by those lucky people who became successful. People who are lucky often tend to ignore the impact of their family of birth, upbringing, schooling, friends, institutions and chances they got attributes to their success. All these gave direction to their hard work and resulted in the desired impact. Less do some of these successful people acknowledge that their thinking, motivations and actions are constantly being shaped by the environment and circumstances.

We tend to measure our success or failure by milestones. Having or by not having. Seemingly either you are, or are not, successful. In real life, it is a continuum that we seldom appreciate. It is an endless chase that we are designed to pursue. This chase starts well before we are born and persists throughout. Even the ones that have reached the highest state of self-actualisation or salvation, do have a chase ingrained in them.

For those for whom the ducks line up to get there smoother and faster versus the others. It is not that you are lucky or unlucky. The question becomes how lucky you are and how hard work can make you luckier.

The question you should always ask is how much hard work I am putting in, in the right direction for luck to work in my favour?

Lucky or unlucky works like a series of actions that result in an outcome, like knowing the combination to the safe. Let’s think about it like a palette of choices say on a die. When you roll a dice say when you roll a dice 1 results in a diminished outcome progressing to 6 which allows you to enjoy a mighty outcome of your actions. As mentioned before these outcomes can be related to where you get to study, who you get married to, and so on.

Every time you roll the dice the level of outcome you can enjoy depends on what you get between one and six. For every roll, you only have a limited palette of outcomes. Though this game is never ending and started well before you were born and join it as soon as you can get to play, for the sake of this exercise let’s say it is about to start. Assuming you get to take one life-changing outcome each year. Now the scene is set let’s play.

There are 7.830,458,560 people on the planet. Image the game starts and roll the dice.

Year 1 — there will be 1305,076,427 who will roll a 6

Year 2- 217512738 who will roll a 6

Year 3- 36,252,122 who will roll a 6

Year 4- 6042021 who will roll a 6

Year 5- 1007003 who will roll a 6

Year 6- 163833 who will roll a 6

Year 7–27972 who will roll a 6

Year 8–4662 who will roll a 6

Year 9–777 who will roll a 6

Year 10–129 who will roll a 6

Year 11–21 who will roll a 6

Further, starting from the second year we will add more people who will start rolling the dice as people are being born and added to the list while others perish away.

Now Imagine the ones who had a lucky streak for 11 years, telling others how their hard work has reaped their rewards. Perhaps will give them a right to tell others, I know how to roll the dice better than anyone else, I’m gonna run a training school, which will teach you how to roll the dice. I’m a mentor, I’m the coach and I’m the trainer, and the ideal person perhaps will amass a huge amount of money in the process. Some might start this process sooner than their 11 years with success. Am I saying they did not work hard, not at all, all I am suggesting is the ones that are successful have a bias towards taking up hard work and the ones that aren’t have a bias towards talking up luck, Truth is somewhere in the middle. Akin to rolling the dice more often, all being equal,

the harder you work, you throw more odds in your favour.

If this intrigues you and you have a story that you want to share, please drop me a note. Thanks

© SAMEER BABBAR