Are you just lucky?

Are you just lucky?

I’ve been asking myself this over the last few days. Just jumbling it around in my head.

So I thought I’d write and see what came out.

I read that Zappos used the interview question, do you consider yourself a lucky or unlucky person?

Apparently they placed a heavy weight on the answer too tending to avoid hiring people who see themselves as unlucky.

In one study people who consider themselves lucky were also more likely to see opportunities or in this case, paper money on the floor.

I guess zappos were trying to find people who saw opportunities to help others.

I was thinking about adding a question about luck into my podcast and for some reason I’ve yet to ask it.

Often people take offence at being called lucky as if it somehow belittles them or their achievement.

But how much is luck involved in our lives?

2018 I received a response to a cold LinkedIn message.

“Hey man, sounds interesting, fancy a coffee Thursday morning Torvehallerne, Original Coffee?”

I cycled over, had a great chat and left with a new client. Later that day I received an intro email.

My new client had connected me with the COO of the company he owned. The next day I was back at Original Coffee and signed another client.

Not long after the CEO and COO of the company next door got in touch. Then an investor in Boston, a lady in Japan, then more leadership coaching with the first two companies.

A web sprung up in more directions than I can explain. And no doubt amongst that, opportunities missed and mistakes made that stopped the web branching further.

Not only have I had a huge amount of fun but I felt incredibly valued and made a good chunk of money too.

But how did it all happen?

It’s really hard to say what the force behind it all was or is, luck seems to be the only conclusion I can draw.

And I have a lot of stories like that one.

I drew one of those mind maps that took me from my degree, to meeting my wife to owning a gym, to becoming a coach to moving to Denmark. All the result of luck, chance meetings, moments in time that had to be exact or I would have missed them.

Part of me wonders how many I’ve missed that were right there but I was too mentally distracted to notice.

Having thought about that and the ridiculous odds of each thing, it really does seem like luck is that secret ingredient in life.

I can’t help but think though that the secret ingredient in luck is PRESENCE.

Like full mind, body and soul presence. Because each of those magic moments I was THERE fully there.

Enthusiastically, energetically, deliberately there.

And perhaps that’s how it works.

Perhaps we all get all the luck we can carry and our job is to remove all those things from our lives and our brains that pull us out of the present so that we can seize it when it’s there.

Or maybe it’s always there and we just need to make sure we are?