What’s Luck Got To Do With It

Luck is such a funny topic to me. If you talk to successful people, they minimize luck in their lives. They take credit for the success and see luck as something they managed.

If you talk with unsuccessful people, they maximize luck in their lives. They claim that bad luck caused their hardships and that despite their valiant efforts, they had external factors go against them.

The funny part, is that we should actually flip that around. It is easy to take 100% responsibility for our lives when we succeed. Failure makes it harder to take responsibility.

Ask the super successful about taking responsibility and it is easy for them to agree that we all need to be culpable for our lives. Sure, when it all works out, that is simple.

And we all do it. When things go our way, we puff out our chests and raise our heads a bit higher. We see all the work we put in and assume that luck wasn’t a factor. But it was.

When we fail, none of us want to own that. We don’t want to say, “Everyone else did fine, but I screwed up.”

We try to shift the blame. We find a scapegoat. Our ego screams for protection and our mind goes to work to do everything it can to rid us of the guilt we feel.

The reason I am making such general statements is because this is human nature. It isn’t that successful people take responsibility and unsuccessful people blame others.

It is that we all take credit for the good stuff and pass blame for the bad stuff. If it is human nature, then of course we see humans following this.

If you are human, you probably do it as well. Unless you consciously work to change how you think, you probably fall into the same exact pattern as other humans.

But the great thing about being human, is that we can learn from this insight and make changes. It won’t change everything, but we can change much more than most think we can.

The reason I say it needs to switch is simple. When you succeed, you don’t need more of an ego boost. You need to humble yourself. Humility is the best response to avoid the large head and insatiable ego.

When you fail, you don’t need to find the external factors that went against you. You need to take responsibility for your part. You need to find the areas you own and then change them. This is the best way to improve.

I always tell people I coach that they need to control what they can control. We tend to complain about the aspects lacking our ability to change. Even if we made a huge blunder, we point to those external factors to save our ego.

Notice that it is our ego that pushes us in the wrong direction. We succeed and ego wants more credit. We fail and ego wants protection from any culpability.

Success and happiness are possible for all of us, but we need to know human nature. Then, we need to understand that as humans, we will fall into those traps if we aren’t consciously pushing away from them.

In this case, taking responsibility has a duality based on success. So, what’s luck go to do with it?

For me, luck is the easy button to challenge the ego. When I succeed, I look for things outside of my control that contributed. When I fail, I look past luck to see how I responded to the situation. It helps deflate my ego.

But I am human, and I’ve explained that it is human nature to let the ego run the show. Therefore, I am not perfect, or even close to egoless life. But, by knowing this, I can accept this shortcoming and work to improve. I can learn to make progress despite perfection being an impossibility.