Roman stoic philosopher Seneca famously declared that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. He couldn’t have been more right. The people who says a successful person became lucky doesn’t understand the effort it takes in order to achieve success. Due to the globalization of the entire world, competition is fiercer than ever. It’s quite difficult to achieve success through pure luck.
It’s easy to point at Mark Cuban and call him lucky for selling his company at the height of the dot com bubble. Or even point at Warren Buffett and say how lucky he was to be born in the best time period to have ever been born. Guess what?
For every one Warren Buffett there was born, there were millions of other males that were born in the 30’s as well.
For every one Mark Cuban with an internet company who sold during the dot com boom, there were hundreds of thousands who refused to sell. He had the foresight to make the decision and actually go through with negotiating with Yahoo.
The people who call your success luck are the people who are jealous of the successes that you’ve built. They can’t stand knowing that others are successful while they couldn’t achieve success themselves. So they have to resort to attributing your success to things that you can’t control. To make themselves feel better.
That’s completely OK. You know better. You understand that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. The countless hours and days you’ve poured into mastering your craft. Then when the right timing and opportunity comes along, you pounce on it like a lion circling a gazelle.
Luck is When Preparation Meets Opportunity Meaning
The saying luck is when preparation meets opportunity means that while the opportunities available to you are random, you had the foresight to seize it when others didn’t. Why do people call your success luck? Success isn’t standardized. There isn’t a one size fits all approach that everyone can take to get to where they want to be.
So when a successful person got there through unconventional means that no one else had the chance to do, outsiders call that luck. Maybe you happened to meet a billionaire investor at the right time at the right place who was looking to invest in a company that does business in your industry. A totally unplanned and unforeseen event.
Then you had the thinking to convince that billionaire to invest in your own company and receive tremendous support both financially and operationally. After hearing that story, people will call that luck. I call it success. Even if you didn’t plan to do something like that, you had the guts to talk to that billionaire.
Most successful and wealthy person achieved success through hard work. There are some that was born into wealth but there are many more who wasn’t. They achieved success through millionaire habits they picked up over the years. Instead of following what the 99% does, they studied and looked at what the 1% does.
Then they kept up with those habits over a long time and achieved their goals and dreams. The great news is that in the United States, the vast majority of people can achieve success. The United States is the land of opportunity. Smart work is vastly and un-proportionally rewarded.
Additionally, with the invention of the internet and the vast amount of free information we can access, there’s no telling what you can achieve.
The Myth of the Overnight Success
Why do people call successful people lucky and an overnight success? One reason is because they are jealous. Another reason is because they only see the results. When you see a grand slam tennis final, you only see what the players produced and worked towards.
You don’t see the hours, days, weeks, months, and years of them putting in effort day in and day out.
You only see the final product of their efforts. It applies to everything else as well, not just in tennis. In business, very rarely do people create a billion dollar business in its first year. it does happen but that’s the outlier of successful businesses. Business owners have a “I almost went bankrupt” story.
However, the rest of the world doesn’t see or experience that. They only see what they read on the media and think that it has always been successful. The immense amount of sacrifice and hours it takes to build a successful business goes over their heads. Then they get the false sense of notion that they achieved overnight success.
There are lottery winners out there who’ve achieved overnight success. However, do you know how many lottery winners there are per year? Not very many.
Aside from lottery winners, most people achieved success by understanding that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. They took advantage of opportunities the best way they could and as often as they could.
One way you can understand that luck is when preparation meets opportunity is to SMASH that social share button for the Google algorithm! Your friends who are lurking around in your favorite social media deserves to know this information as well. Share the information so that your friends’ mindsets can improve as well!
Over-Preparation is the Best
I used to think that success was an innate trait. That some people just had it and that some people just didn’t. The ones who are truly successful doesn’t need to put in that much effort because they’re already that good. Somewhere along the way, I learned that putting in more effort doesn’t make you a loser.
The outside world generally want results and want results now. Therefore, when they see someone put in effort they think they are wasting their time. That they should have already achieved the goals already. That’s not how the world works. You can’t achieve results without putting in the effort.
You can’t get anything in return unless you give something first. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Without the preparation, there’s no way that you can achieve anything in this world. Therefore, the best way to position yourself to succeed is by over-preparing.
Over-prepare for EVERYTHING. You have a presentation coming up? Review not just what you want to present but possible questions that others can ask. Review who your audience is and tailor your communication style to your audience. Plan out what you are going to wear and get there a little bit early.
This doesn’t mean memorize every single word you want to say to a T. Rather, it means you should go above and beyond in your preparation so you’re not caught off when the day actually comes. Practice, practice, and practice some more.
The ones who’ve achieved mastery practiced more times than any other person who’s competing against them. It applies everything else, not just in public speaking. When you put in the hours and actually take the time to get better, you start to get better. There’s no such thing as someone being innately successful.
How to Achieve Success Through Preparation
So now you may be thinking, well ok, so luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Success isn’t achieved by sitting on the couch. Success doesn’t come to you. You have to go out and achieve success, no one is going to hand it to you.
Well great, I’m fully convinced! Now, how do I get there?
There are countless ways to get there. The 3 ways below are the most important ways to get there and shouldn’t be ignored at all costs. I’ve religiously followed the steps below to now it has become a way of life for me. It’s a default that I will employ the steps.
You’re on the right track to winning when your baseline mindset is aligned with the behaviors below.
1) Work Harder than Others
How great is it that success is just achieved by putting in more hours than the next person? No need to create a complicated machine that cures cancer but you just need to put in more hours and effort? That means that success is a learned behavior, not an innate one. No one was born out of the womb knowing how to become successful.
People learned throughout the way.
If you truly put in the hours to become a master at what you want to become a master in, you’re doing the right thing. Don’t spend five hours reading the financial statements of a company while simultaneously spending 2.5 hours distracted on your phone and say you’ve put in the hours. Be brutally honest with yourself.
Honestly put in the hours that you said you were going to put in. If you are trying to lose weight did you really measure your calories correctly or did you subtract calories and complain that you’re not losing weight? A 1,500 calorie intake a day is enough to lose weight for most people of height and weight.
The ultimate point is that as long as you put in more hours than the next person, you should be better than them. If you don’t see results right away, you just have to be patient and let time do its work. You can turn anything into a talent as long as you put in enough hours into it and continuously look for ways to improve.
2) Practice Self Belief
It doesn’t matter that luck is when preparation meets opportunity if you don’t believe that you are worthy of being excellent. When you don’t have confidence in yourself, no amount of good opportunities that pass your way will matter. You will decide to pass on those opportunities not because others told you you can’t have them.
But because you told yourself that you can’t have those opportunities. Don’t lose because of yourself.
The ones who have achieved success have positive expectations about the decisions that they’ve made. They believe that the decisions that they are making will allow them to move forward. While they may not know that it will help them later down the road, they have faith that they will.
That’s the kind of thinking that you need. If you’re negative about everything instead of being realistic or slightly optimistic about your choices, what you thought will happen will happen. Whether you think you can do it or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.
You can’t seize opportunities if you don’t think it’s going to work out in the first place.
3) Have the Right Mindset
Don’t have a victim mentality. You are not a victim. The victim mentality is that you believe the world owes you something. That the position you are in is not fixable and therefore you should give up. That’s wrong. While the birth lottery does matter, you can still lose the birth lottery and win in the end. The victor mentality isn’t “I’m so poor” it’s “how can I afford it?”
The system IS stacked against you. There’s no denying it. The tax codes and rates are designed to make the lowest rungs of the ladder continue working. The game is designed so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. College tuition rates skyrocketed in the past decade so that only the wealthiest can afford to get a formal education.
Instead of relying on somebody else to fix problems for you, go out and fix those problems yourself. You are more than capable of doing so. It doesn’t matter where you start it matters where you end up. Plenty of people bootstrapped their ways to success without any external help or influence.
You are more than capable of becoming one of those people as well.
No one owes you anything, not even your parents or grandparents. Depend on nobody else but yourself. One of the right mindsets is knowing that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Ignore the others who are telling you that your achieved success through sheer luck alone. That’s just not accurate.
Success is Hard Work, Make Your Own Luck
When people ask, “is success luck or hard work?” The right answer is overwhelmingly hard work. The ones who say it’s all luck don’t understand that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. They don’t realize the sheer amount of hours that people had to put in to achieve success.
Positioning yourself to succeed is more important than the act of actually succeeding. Set yourself up for success. Over-prepare for anything that might come your way. Don’t be one of the bitter people who attributes everyone’s success to luck.
Be one of those people who everyone criticizes for achieving wild success instead of the one doing the criticizing.
I didn’t achieve a $320,000 net worth at the age of 26 because I got lucky in a Gamestop investment. I’ve been investing for years and years and it’s finally paying off. The results are showing. I contributed 20 – 50% of my paycheck to the S&P 500 for almost five straight years. It’s difficult to get lucky through investing, anyway.
Even if you did hit the Gamestop jackpot, I would argue that it wasn’t luck. You’ve probably been investing in the stock market for a while and understand the intricacies of it. You made your own luck and seized the opportunity when it was right in front of you.
For every one who seized the opportunity, there’s hundreds of thousands who didn’t.
Don’t get lucky, make your own luck. It takes 10 – 20 years and once you make your own luck, everyone will call you an overnight success. That’s when you know you’ve made it and you took the right steps to get to where you are. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
When I was younger I considered myself to be a lucky person. Looking back, I realized that all the ‘luck’ that I encountered in the past, were because I did put myself out there and I did my share of hardwork and sleepless nights.
I realized I became lucky because my chances of succeeding in my chosen endeavors became bigger when I exerted more effort in them.
I have never won the lottery yet though, not even the minor prizes hahahaha!
I remember I used to think “hey what a minute, what if I make like $10 a week playing the lottery? I don’t need to make millions of dollars, just making $10 a week is fine for me”. That plan got destroyed real fast when I realized that’s not how lotteries work.
Effort breed results. Although luck is an absolutely necessary component that doesn’t mean we can’t make our own luck. Let’s work hard our way to success!