Why I Believe in Luck (But Don’t Want To)

Some guys have all the luck.

You may have one of these people in your life. Despite not working any harder or smarter than you, this guy gets the promotion at work. He’s constantly winning contests and he has no trouble finding parking spots on congested downtown streets. He’s always in the right place at the right time. What could possibly account for all of these positive scenarios? For this and for many other reasons, I believe in luck. I don’t know if I believe in lucky charms, like the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe shown above, but I do believe that it is certainly favorable to have luck on your side.

With millions of blogs on the Internet, only a handful ever generate enough money to replace a full-time income. Some of these sites find success by accident. By pure happenstance, they stumble across some sort of opportunity that takes the blog to the next level. Maybe they happen to get featured on the WordPress.org showcase. Maybe a newspaper editor happens to come across the blog and wants to write a feature on it. It could be anything.

Am I saying that only the lucky succeed? No, not necessarily. Even though you want to have luck on your side and it certainly doesn’t hurt to be a little lucky, you can still stack the odds in your favor. If you’re sitting around and waiting for success to fall in your lap, it’s probably not going to happen. If you head out with vigor and determination, working hard to achieve your goals, you are more likely to attract success. Making money online can be an incredibly mysterious endeavor, but if you don’t make a consistent effort in pursuing this endeavor, you will never become a dot com mogul, a super affiliate, or an otherwise successful online entrepreneur.

Another great example of this concept is poker. The cards that you receive for each hand are relatively random. That’s luck. You could end up with garbage or you could wake up with pocket aces. Sometimes you’ll run into good luck; other times, you’ll run into bad luck. However, poker is recognized by many as a skill game, because it really depends on how you play those cards. A superior player will be able to push a lesser player off of the winning hand, just as the lesser player can fall into the trap of a better player and lose everything. How you play the cards is just as important, if not more important, than the actual cards themselves.

I’d like to believe that hard work, experience, and expertise will always be rewarded. I’d like to believe that your level of success is directly proportional to your efforts, but that’s very rarely the case. Luck always plays a role, not only in the lottery, but just in life in general. The size of luck’s role, however, is up to you.