Do you believe in luck?
What Is Luck, And Does It Affect Your Chances Of Success?
David KleinhandlerForbes Councils MemberForbes Finance CouncilCOUNCIL POST| Membership (fee-based)MoneyPOST WRITTEN BYDavid KleinhandlerFounder and President of Vest Financial Group, David writes about entrepreneurship, financial wellness, and real-world success.
I can't count how many successful people I've known who, when asked how they got to where they are today, have simply said they were "lucky." It's true that a little modesty never hurt anyone, but luck isn't what separates those who get what they want in life from those who don't. What most people choose to call luck is the result of being open to opportunity -- something that comes down to attitude, not happy accidents.
Though he may not have had the business world in mind, per se, the poet John Milton is often credited as describing luck as the residue of design. I think there's a lot of truth to this, even if it's not possible to design a blueprint for success in business. What you can do -- on purpose and by design -- is choose how to perceive good opportunities coming your way. No one would argue that a chance encounter can't alter the course of a career, but it's easy to discount how much goes into making an opportunity out of an encounter. You can call meeting a random stranger luck if you want, but what follows is anything but.
Psychologist and author Richard Wiseman has spent his career studying luck and our perception of it. What he found after years of investigation is that luck is completely a matter of how we choose to look at our lives. The people who consider themselves lucky are the ones who recognize their own good fortune wherever it happens and look at the world through that lens. What they aren't are people onto whom amazing things shower down from above.
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