There is no such thing as luck; only adequate and inadequate preparation
to cope with the statistical universe.
I know someone who is very ‘unlucky’. Every time something bad happens in his life, he bemoans his bad luck. He uses it as an excuse to beat on himself. He’s not very successful.
But this person was once given an ‘in’ to the family construction business, and blew it because he lost his temper and quit. He was given a down payment for his first house, but he quit his job and lost it. He fought with his wife, got a divorce, and paid alimony. He had some bad luck with his health, but on the other hand he never took very good care of himself either.
I know another guy who got a great job because a person he helped out a lot by going above and beyond the call as a salesman turned out to be hiring for his dream job. Of course, if he hadn’t busted his ass to help a customer when other salesmen would just do the minimum, the ‘luck’ would never have happened. The same guy married a smart, beautiful girl after meeting her by ‘accident’. Of course, he had spent a lot of time just before that getting himself in shape and losing a bunch of weight, so when that perfect girl came long he maximized the chance that she might notice him…
There are of course extremes. There are people who are dealt a truly lousy hand from life, and others who have silver spoons falling in their mouths despite their best efforts to spit them out. But the vast majority of people in the middle of the curve get their share of opportunities - the ‘lucky’ ones are the ones who, through excellent preparation and work ethic, are capable of grabbing on when lady luck goes strolling by.
Having earlier come down in favor of hard work being somewhat more important than luck, I’m going to engage in a hijack here.
For “making it,” hard work is necessary but not sufficient; but luck comes to (or is seized by) those who are prepared for it, so hard work is still the more important aspect.
But bad luck can screw anybody. And that bad luck can range all the way from the circumstances in which you were born and raised to a catastrophic illness wiping out everything you’ve got. There’s a lot of things out there that all the hard work in the world can’t help.
You’re barking up the wrong tree. What bugs me isn’t the lack of fairness, it’s the waste. Presumably, a lot of people who fall by the wayside have just as much energy and effort as their luckier brethren, I sure would like to live in a society where all that energy and effort paid off more often – I suspect it would be much wealthier than the one I live in now.
I’ve heard that it was Voltaire who said it, I’ve heard that it was Pasteur, but all I know for certain is that Harlan Ellison likes to repeat it a lot: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Lucky things happen to a lot of people every day, but it’s only those with the grit and the smarts to seize the opportunity who get the benefit of that luck. Meanwhile, there are a lot of hardworking people out there, and most wouldn’t know a good break if it fell on them; of those who would, most never get one. It takes all three to really make it big.
Quite frankly, it’s luck that determines whether you’re smart in the first place, and there’s a smidgen of luck in getting parents who instill the value of hard work, but those aren’t the kind of luck that people talk about much.
You know, that’s another part of it. You have to be willing to take some chances.
I know someone who hates their job. Bloody miserable in it. Has a ton of experience in her field, well-trained, sterling work history. So it should be easy for her to find a new job, right? But…she won’t move from the small town she’s lived in all her life, future employers have to fit a laundry list of criteria so strict that I don’t think any company actually could fit these criteria, and it can’t be more than, say, a 30 minute drive from where she lives. She wouldn’t even consider moving in-town, much less to another state or across the country. She also won’t consider doing anything outside the 9-5 kind of requirements for her job, like going to conferences and the other kind of professional job+ kinds of things people do.
Strangely, she’s having terrible “luck” finding another job.