What’s Luck Got To Do With It?…

Do you believe in Luck?

Do you believe that many, if not all, of the people who have become outstandingly successful rich, or famous were just lucky? Indeed, IS there such a thing as luck at all?




As I read through self-help material, I am constantly being told that “there is no such thing as luck”. In fact, Brian Tracy has a program out called “The Luck Factor”, and the whole premise is that you basically make your own luck. I have heard other popular speakers go even further and say that there is no such thing.

For a while, I believed this to be true, but these days I do wonder. You see, many of these speakers point to extraordinarily successful individuals, and then go on to show how these people MADE their own success, and that luck had little to do with it.

Now this may be true in part; maybe even for the most part. However, the strange thing is that when you ask many of these self-same examples of success about it, they DO believe in luck, or else they make it very clear that they personally never expected to achieve the level of success that they have achieved. In other words, it really wasn’t such a big picture intention-filled plan, as many people would have you believe.

Donald Trump admitted to believing in Luck in a recent interview. Along with another factors that most self-help gurus would nod their heads sagely about, Bill Gates also once admitted that a large part of his initial success was down to Luck. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones once said that when they started out, their big ambition was to be the biggest band in…. London! And Oprah Winfrey, America’s first black woman billionaire, said that she once figured that if she could make a MILLION dollars in her entire life, she would have considered herself a big success.

All these examples, and many more, make it clear that sometimes extraordinary success overtakes the people experiencing it. It’s almost as if their own vision was too small for what eventually happened to them. There is a lot to be said for finding and surfing a tidal wave!

Now, all of this is not to say that personal growth principles do not play a very LARGE part in a person’s success, and in differentiating that person from the crowd. However, it may not be EVERYTHING, which is the way the personal growth gurus might have you think.

Of course, on a bigger picture view, they are right. If we look at our lives from a metaphysical karmic perspective, pretty well all that happens to us happens for a reason. It is only from the human personality consciousness perspective that we fail to see the consequences of our previous actions - maybe in previous lives - and hence attribute what happens to us as good or bad luck.

However, from the ground level perspective of human daily living, it IS hard to attribute everything that happens to a person as a result of their failure or success in applying success principles.

So what do you think? What does Luck have to do with it?…

So what do you think? What does Luck have to do with it?…

Make your comment below!

Copyright Asoka Selvarajah 2005. All Rights Reserved.