Luck is us

How do you define luck? We tend to visualise luck as some formless, soulless entity. A benevolent ghost that you can’t see or hear or feel, which we all worship and pray it present itself and shower us with good fortune.

In most cases, luck is actually… us. We, the people, are the reason why some of us get lucky and some of us don’t. The fact that your bus arrived even if you were late to the bus stop is because of the actions of other people. It could because bus driver decided to wait an extra minute at the bus stop. It could because of a traffic accident that caused a traffic jam, making bus late. It could because a mechanic done a poor job servicing the bus, which caused bus to be late due to mechanical issue.

When things don’t go as planned, it’s easy to think that we ran out of luck—that whatever we did, we had no choice but to absorb the misfortune that was inevitably about to happen. When our business is failing, it’s easy to throw all blame on luck, because then we don’t need to admit that it’s our fault, which while makes us feel better, it doesn’t bring any solution to the problem.

There’s always an explanation why things went wrong. Finding it is the only thing that is going to prevent it from happening again.