I am happy because I am back to my ‘reading’. Not necessarily the best of the bunch but satisfactory to the soul and given my nature, books are like reading my own palm. I came across a quote lately which says “the more you work hard the more you get lucky”. Initially sounded simple, the actual meaning stuck me more than I’ve imagined and a thought process triggered inevitably.

Is talent a gift or residue of hard work? What is more important, luck or passion? From our ancient texts to modern day literature, volumes of literature debated over those points and oracles presented their genius opinion. Nevertheless, the ‘luck’ factor always made it to the finish line, amongst others. So what exactly is luck? Is it the probability value of 1 for winning? Is it the factor that favors one during a race to beat the other? Or, is it really defined as ‘the chance of happening of fortunate or adverse  events’? Its up to our interpretation of what we want to think about it and not what we know about it.

Coming back to the above phrase of people getting lucky by hard work which I favor more than any other definitions that exists out there, the very insight makes me feel, what am I doing all these days, when ever I felt I was not lucky.

Let us examine the paraphernalia around getting lucky. Someone spins a coin and you got that right the very fist time, lucky, yes. Spin again and again you got it right, lucky may be. People often attribute this to fluke than lucky, again a different topic. If this goes on and on again, the luck turns to suspicion and con. What are the chances of person getting 100% out of a 50-50 probability, far less than one can imagine, right. Now let’s examine another scenario. You spin the coin now and get it right every time you call, and again people think you are a con. If you replace yourself with a magician, the same people are amused by his act and accolades follow, why such a bias? The reason is that with the word magic, the logic disappears and hard work is often ignored. The magician may have really tricked you by using a coin that always make him or her win, but there is enormous amount of hard work involved. Now if you as a ordinary person practice to spin a coin exactly the same way every time, down to the detail of the number of spins, height, etc., the impossible fades and hard work lights up. Its up with anything we do.

Quite often in Cricket, the players think that a bowler is lucky to have got a top edge that went for a catch. However, it is not. If he has read the batsmen reaction to a particular ball and bowls a ball with such an accuracy that 10 out of 10 times, the batsmen will hit it and it goes for a top edge, he is not lucky but his hard work payed off.

Luck is something you earn by doing more hard work and increase your chance of making a condition favorable to you and it is not impossible.

And by the way, here is an important link for this post.