I think luck, or being lucky, can be a perspective. I've posted on here about awful things that I've been through in college but I still consider myself a lucky person. - I got a job in 2009 in the financial sector, a job I had no experience or reason to obtain, a job that let me work from home full time and essentially dick around - No one around me who I'm close with has died - I've never been pulled over or gotten a speeding ticket - in fact, besides a few parking tickets, never had to mess with the police at all - I've leveraged my initial job into a job where I make twice as much as I did intially, and that's within 3 years - I've never broken a bone, never been hospitalized due to major illness, etc - My bone tumor wasn't cancer! Half of this (more) is perspective. I could look at all the shitty things in my life and say I am an unlucky person. You could argue that I'm not attributing enough to myself when I say, for instance, I got a job out of luck. But come on - a job in 2009 in the finance sector when I hadn't even finished getting my degree in English? I was applying for all jobs all over the place then. I was lucky enough to find that job posting. And I felt lucky to get the job. But I like to maintain my belief that some of it is luck. I think I've gotten a lot of great things out of life and I am young and there is more coming. My brother totalled his car in a collision with a house and didn't have airbags, he emerged without a scratch. The police officers were shocked. How is that in some way not luck? So I cling to a belief that my clan has luck, because I feel I have been lucky more times in my life than is accountable. Maybe my regression to the mean is coming up...but I think I also have a sunny disposition and am likely to look on the positive side of things and am likely to be thankful for the opportunities that come my way, and I will call it luck. For me, luck and being lucky is as much about attitude and perspective as what happens to you in life.
Wasn't it you who said that luck was when opportunity meets preparation? But the way I see it, perspective is the framework to look at the past for information about the present. Looking back, I have had an enormous deal of fortune in my life. I happen to be born in one of the best countries in the world on a social, economical and educational level (Netherlands). Of the people born there, I happen to be a part of the minority that goes to university. That does an honorary programme. That has good prospects. Great friends and family. Enough money to live as I want to without a debt accumulating. That has been able to go to Hong Kong, and I'm planning to study in Canada next year. I could go on and on about all the things I'm grateful for. Where I hesitate is to call it lucky. Nearly everything on that list had a lot of factors that had to be right to make it happen. I've beaten the odds multiple times, but is that lucky or is it just improbable? The difference between the two is that luck is endogenous. It happens beyond one's control, whereas something improbable can still happen if you put more effort in it. There is always an edge of randomness, of events occurring at the same time that you just can't control. Sometimes, that randomness becomes an important factor, as in your improbable '09 search for a financial job. But I doubt that you would've found the job you found if you didn't go around asking everywhere, having great interviews, improving your job-finding skills. My perspective is that I've had a lot of optimal conditions for good things to happen. And I've put in effort / preparation for some events. Both contribute to it happening. Some played out well and others don't, often a matter of soulless statistics. Some improbable outcomes were positively impacted by luck (e.g. meeting the right person to get me into an exchange programme) and others negatively. Don't get me wrong, I'm still just as grateful of what has happened to me, it's just that I don't think I have a luck fairy following me and helping me around. Luck is the easy reason. As mk puts more brief,Personally, I think it is damaging for people to view the world as a place where luck is what makes the difference between success and failure. Everyone encounters rare circumstance, however dynamic people leverage what is available, and non-dynamic people do not.
This is true, though somebody else said it long before me; I was afraid of sounding repetitive. This is also true, and you could (possibly effectively) argue that attributing the job to luck is just a variant on Imposter Syndrome, i.e., a refusal to take accountability for just how stinkin' awesome I am all the time. I try to avoid [excessive] ego and it is also inconceivable to me that someone who hadn't even finished her undergrad degree and had no experience in the financial sector deserved in any way a job at a level where most people end their career in banking. In my job I was and continue to be surrounded by people who have worked their way up into this position and are my parents' age or even older. My current salary is almost equal to my mother's, and she is capped out in earnings, i.e., she won't make any more at her job, ever. I think it can be damaging for people to think that they are wholly in control of, and also always deserve, what they receive. That's why I'm willing to attribute some of my success to luck, to just happening to apply for that job at the right time, etc. For instance, do you know what made me good at interviewing? Ultimately? Do you know what made me a good candidate? I spoke well, carried myself well, was articulate, was impressive. My parents made me that way. More importantly my background made me that way and it's not pretty but it's true: being a white middle-class American with parents who cared about my grammar helped spring me my first job. Because of the family I was born into I was able to go to college. I was able to present myself well according to social norms, well or even better than average. And what I cannot control, and what no one can control, is what class they are born into, and the bottom of that line is that I feel, and should feel, insanely lucky to have been born into the class and family into which I was born.Wasn't it you who said that luck was when opportunity meets preparation?
But I doubt that you would've found the job you found if you didn't go around asking everywhere, having great interviews, improving your job-finding skills.