The Role That Luck Plays In Our Success

Why Being Thankful For Good Fortune Doesn’t Have to Ignore Impact of Effort & Skill

“There’s no free lunches,” was the mantra my father repeated to me most often as a kid. I was taught that effort matters (alongside ethics) and, ahead of the ‘growth mindset’ being academically coined, believed that with enough focus on a goal, I could probably get closer to achieving it. And now as a parent myself, we work to instill similar values in our daughter. Given this, why do I also now ascribe ‘luck’ (and not just my own attributes) as such a significant factor in my own success? Not because I’m less secure in my abilities, but because I’m more expansive in defining what luck actually means.

In my understanding now, luck isn’t about removing the notion of self-determination, or suggesting that everything which happens to us is just a random number generator. Instead my luck is a set of circumstances that I was gifted and which created the platform upon which I built my life. This includes: Where and when I was born; my health; the cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic benefits; and so on. Sometimes it’s not about what you have (I wasn’t a silverspoon kid) but what you didn’t have to deal with (I also wasn’t born into poverty).