Is There Ever Such a Thing as Luck?

Keep on rolling…The damn dice don’t know you’re a loser!

Werner Erhard

Life is best understood through metaphors. For example, life is a game. We play games for entertainment, for a chance to interact with others, and above all, to keep from being bored. When boredom sets in, we stop playing the game, because it is no fun anymore.

In order to keep a game exciting, chance and surprise must be built-in. If a game is totally predictable, as when a wife always beats her husband at bridge, they stop playing. The game has become insipid.

What ensures a game stays fascinating is the realization that it is only a game, and thus it doesn’t ultimately matter. It serves as a wonderful diversion. Since the consequences are imaginary, you can play all out. In life, we too often hold back, because we aren’t ready to face the implications. I have yet to go skydiving, although I live in an area where that wouldn’t be hard to do.

Luck Is All in How You See It

Players in a game of cards are lucky or unlucky, depending on how their hand is dealt. Poker is one of the few card games that requires skill, as you can outwit your competitors through the betting process. You’ve got to know when to hold the cards, and when to fold them. You can even try to bluff them, which makes the game a whole lot more interesting.

Luck ultimately is an interior factor. It is not merely a set of circumstances. It is knowing what to make of your circumstances, how to be opportunistic. Even more, luck applies the Law of Attraction to best effect. The hit documentary, The Secret, sensationalized the process. You wish something, let it go, and sure enough, it magically appears without your doing a thing.

In truth, the Law of Attraction actually sets up a force field that increases the probability you will get exactly what you want. In most cases, you still need to use your intelligence and take massive action. However, you will find your action a lot more effective when you are totally clear as to what you want.

Of Course There’s Luck: Shit Happens!

You may rightly say that unfavorable circumstances happen whether you want them or not. For example, you grew up in Syria and suddenly find yourself displaced by civil war. People are bombing and gassing your homeland right and left.

Bad things happen to good people. Where is the luck factor? As has been said, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I would have no luck at all!” You may never directly experience anything as heartbreaking as a civil war in Syria where you end up a displaced emigrant. However, you can never count on everything going your way all the time.

As strange as it seems, those refugees who establish themselves in Germany and elsewhere just might end up model citizens, break into media and become movie stars. Stranger things have happened. London, New York and Hollywood all honor talent. You cannot successfully predict who will be creative, and who will not.

Some of Us Start Out with All the Breaks

We can all think of people who became superstars in their own fields, and even changed history. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world in the emerging field of personal computing. His parents were attorneys and bankers. Bill could afford to attend Harvard University. He happened to be brilliant with a passion for computing.

Likewise, Steve Jobs grew up in Silicon Valley and came of age at just the right time for personal computing to emerge as a mega-industry. Like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs was brilliant and had parents who truly loved him. He started out at a prestigious private school, Reed College.

However, the other side of the picture is rarely told. Bill Gates voluntarily gave up Harvard after his freshman year and traveled down to Albuquerque, New Mexico during the summer and volunteered to work for just $2 per hour programming the world’s first microcomputer. When he wrote software for that primitive system, practically no one paid him, as it was a hobbiest industry.

After Steve Jobs first year at Reed, he dropped out of his classes and slept in his friends’ dorm rooms, so as to not burden his parents. By then, Steve discovered that his adoptive parents weren’t his actual parents, and went through an emotional crisis. Steve got his girlfriend pregnant and ran off to India only to find that his guru had passed on.

How Bill Gates and Steve Jobs handled their challenges is what made them truly great. They had passionate faith in their mission, and were willing to do anything to make it happen. Bill Gates wanted to put a personal computer onto every desk in the world. Steve Jobs wanted to build a computer even his mother would love, one that would be “insanely great.” They both did just that.

Luck Brings You to the Right Place at the Right Time

You may not have started out at the right place at the right time. In my case, I was born in San Diego, California, went through elementary school in Phoenix, Arizona. In the seventh grade, I had an eccentric teacher share how beautiful was the city of San Francisco. That stuck with me. When my father had to make a job change, I suggested San Francisco, and he bought it. I ended going to college in one of the most innovate periods of history with one revolution happening after another. From the hippies to high-tech.

When you open up your intuition and act from both your heart and mind, ideas and opportunities will synchronistically emerge that can profoundly impact the trajectory of your life. Let’s say that you are a Syrian refugee living in California with no name and no money. You want to be a movie star, but the competition in Hollywood is fierce.

Rather than knocking on the door of talent agents and film studios, you hang out with the techies creating mobile VR. You land a support position in a startup that wants to showcase the possibilities of their VR platform. They need actors to play roles in their short VR films. You are at the right place at the right time. You jump at the chance. While the movie might seem trivial, a Hollywood producer or director sees it, and likes you. Before you know it, you’ve got a call from a studio.

Create Your Own Luck

When you examine the foundations of luck, you will find that the most important factors are internal, not external. You have a say on the most important factors in luck, even though you have little say on massive disruptions. It is all in how you respond to the challenges built into the great game of life.

You can follow a few simple steps to dramatically increase your chances of success:

•  Be grateful for everyone and everything in your life. You are better off than millions of others.
•  Consider yourself lucky. Luck is just a state of mind. It comes out of asking empowering questions. If you keep insisting you are lucky no matter what happens, the universe will begin to agree.
•  Find the one thing above all that you most want to accomplish and focus entirely on that.
•  Tell everyone you trust what you want, and be open to any suggestions and opportunities that resonate with you.
•  Play all out. Give up holding back. There is always room for the best.

We live in the most exciting time in history. The challenges are exponentially greater than ever before, but so also the opportunities. Today you can be shooting movies while walking down the street and broadcast them to the other side of the planet for pennies on the dollar!

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Solomon in Ecclesiastes

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