Not hard work vs luck
Working hard & being lucky are not mutually exclusive
I think James Clear (author of Atomic Habits and my favourite 100% open rate newsletter) just solved an intellectual paradox that plagued me for years.
That riddle is the role of effort in luck, and vice versa.
They say, work hard, work smart. You make your own luck.
I’d always believed in hard work. And it’s true, usually that translates to rewards. And it doesn’t feel like luck at any part to play.
The same seems to be true the other way. If it’s genuinely luck, then any level of effort seems unimportant. I could have worked hard, or worked little, and still won the lottery anyway. Because, luck.
Intellectually, effort and luck seems mutually exclusive.
But back to James Clear. This was how he solved it for me:
Most lucky events in life are opportunities, not outcomes. The value of an opportunity changes depending on how it is treated. Without effort, good luck becomes a missed opportunity. With effort, good luck can become a life-changing event. You need luck and hard work. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and. The result will not walk through the door on its own. – @JamesClear
“It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.”
Let me repeat that again, to burn that into my mind.
Effort and luck are not polarities. They can come together. And when they do, magic happens.
Without hard work, a good opportunity becomes a missed opportunity. Maybe something you won’t even notice you missed. Because you didn’t do the work, you weren’t in the mind space to spot the opportunity. You don’t know what you don’t know, what you missed. Luck was there but you didn’t use it.
With hard work, you were ready to leverage on the opportunity when it presented itself. And it will seem like you did all the work. Perhaps that’s why luck goes mostly unnoticed.
Maybe that’s really what it meant when they say the harder you work, the luckier you get. That bit about making your own luck.
Truth is, you didn’t make any luck. You just noticed it, and used it.
Hard work > awareness > spotting luck > lucky.
There you go. The universal formula for effort and luck.