Create Your Own Luck

Throughout my career experiences, I tend to not believe much in luck. I’ve spent the majority of my career educating myself in methodologies, processes, and best practices. None of my experiences and education covers the mystical powers of luck. Yet I often catch myself saying things like “that was lucky”, or “if we’re lucky, this will happen”. Regardless of my own personal experiences with luck, I think luck is just part of our lives. And luck comes to us more when we create it ourselves. But in order to create your own luck, it requires effort.

Most people by default contribute events that they can’t quickly explain to luck. If it’s something positive, they say it’s “good luck”. But if something bad that happens to them, they say it’s “bad luck”. Even sometimes when they know the exact cause to the outcome of the event, just by habit they still contribute the outcome to luck. I know I certainly do. Sometimes it’s just part of our humility that we don’t want to take the credit for our own success, we simple give the credit to luck. But it was us all along who’ve created our own luck.

Although luck is something that we can simply leave up to chance, it is something I believe we can influence. If we set out to create our own luck, we will experience more luck than not. But we have to put in the effort to create our own luck in order to receive it more often. Here are some areas where you can apply to receive more luck.

• Put yourself out there – Take chances and take risks. All yourself and your team to experiment. Do it with a strategic mindset and give yourself a better chance of success. When you do this, you will not only put you and your team in a better position to achieve success, you will also allow the opportunity to experience better luck.
  
  
• Be positive – Luck can come in the form of the direct success. It can also come in other forms such as more opportunities for you and your teams. Just because you may not arrive with the success you’d hoped for, that doesn’t mean you’re not successful or you’ve met with bad luck. Be positive as it can lead to other opportunities that you hadn’t anticipated. But you cannot let negativity to blind you. Otherwise, you may just miss out on the luck that you’ve created for yourself.
  
  
• Don’t be afraid – Failing isn’t easy to take. But don’t allow failures to inhibit you from taking chances and putting yourself out there. Embrace the possibilities of failure and allow yourself the opportunity for better luck. You can read more on my thoughts about Fear here.
  
  
• Karma – I struggle with this at times, but I honestly do believe in karma. If you do good things, good things will come to you. If you consciously do bad things, then karma will have it’s way to reflect that on to you. Do what you need to do with honesty and integrity and it will bring you good luck. I wholeheartedly believe this. You can read more about Honest here as well as Integrity here.
  
  
• Don’t compare – One of the things that I find many people struggle with is comparing with one another. A simple made up example is if you find $5 on the street, you’d probably feel pretty good about it. You’d probably feel like you had some good luck that day. But if you go tell your friend that you found $5 earlier that day only to hear that all your other friends found $50 each earlier that day, then you may feel like you had bad luck. They found $50 but you only found $5. I find this very odd. I believe that we should just count our own blessings and be happy with the luck we’ve receive rather than comparing it with anyone else.

It doesn’t matter if you believe in luck or not. Even if you don’t believe in luck, you can still follow these suggestions to bring yourself more opportunities for good things to happen. If you don’t do it for yourself, then do it for your team. I’m sure they can certainly appreciate each one of these suggestions when you apply it with them. Give yourself and your team more opportunity for success. Create luck for yourself and your team.

Photo by: Brett Jordan
https://unsplash.com/@brett_jordan