One of the best lessons to learn at any point in life is the value of hard work.
It’s beyond cliche to hear about it and talk about it or whatever. But it’s reached that level for good reason.
If you do enough hard work for a long time you’ll very likely reach a good place.
Can you count on that with 100% certainty? Probably not. But you’re giving yourself pretty good odds.
One of the challenges in life, though, is luck. Luck seems to work like a temptation for many people. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that luck is the reason that others are successful. When you start thinking like that it’s easy to cut back on the hard work and especially the progress you’ve been trying to make.
This dangerous idea is especially difficult to ignore and overcome when many successful people talk about their own success as largely a factor of luck.
What Makes People Successful?
For many of the biographies I’ve read about successful people – in business, entertainment, etc. – there is an element of luck. In fact, for the most humble people it seems to be something they feel is a huge factor in their success.
If you’ve read the Good To Great series of books you’ll find lots of successful businesspeople discussing how luck seemed to play a large role in their success. In fact, Jim Collins and his team kept hearing about luck so often in their research and interviews that they knew they had to dive deeper to see if it was true.
What they found was that luck was certainly a factor in success, but just being lucky wasn’t even close to being enough.
The basic finding was that successful people might have been lucky to find themselves in a good situation. But they weren’t the only ones in that situation. Not even close. Not everyone might be in the same situation, but many people are. Yet only a few succeed at great levels.
Hard Work + Luck
The takeaway from the idea of luck in life and work and business seems to be the idea that successful people are willing to work. To think about things. To take action and do things. To focus on progress and growth. To focus on learning about new things. They build hard work into their lifestyle and personality.
They also focus on luck as something that will come along. They open their lives to the world around them. They observe what is going on and try to find the right opportunities for their hard work.
Not necessarily passions. But channels for their hard work. They look at luck as opportunity. Looking back, it’s easy for them to consider their success a factor of luck. After all, if the opportunity hadn’t been available would they have been as successful?
It’s easy to think that way when hard work is built into your personality.
Put yourself on the same path to success as many people before you. Build habits that come from hard work. Then be open to luck. To opportunities that allow you to channel your hard work into something that allows you to growth and succeed.
There’s no guarantee it’ll work. But that’s the common path many have taken.