Midline Monday: create your own luck
Understanding luck and what we can really control
Weekly Reflections
I consider myself a really lucky guy. My health, my family, my career a lot of good things have broke my way.
When I look back across life, the trajectory isn’t a straight line. It’s a handful of inflection points. Small decisions that reroute everything downstream. Meeting my wife. Deciding to travel. A handful of career decisions.
I try to reflect on the past to inform the future. When good things happened; was I lucky, smart, did I make a good decision, was it hard work?
Here’s an example;
About five years ago we decided to buy a vacation property. My wife found a listing at the top of our budget, in an area we weren’t considering. We drove up, and we while we liked the property, we weren’t quite ready to buy.
Life took over, and we more or less forgot about it.
A few weeks later the listing agent called: there was an offer, and did we want to put in a competing bid? We were in no position for a bidding war on a property at the top end of our price range.
Instead of saying no, we tabled an offer we’d actually be comfortable with. The logic was simple. If the seller said yes, we’d own it on our terms. If we got outbid, then it wasn’t meant to be. We didn’t even have an agent. I typed the offer into an email that evening, an agent got assigned, the docs were drafted, and I went to bed.
The next morning there was a congratulations email in my inbox.
We used the cottage for a couple years, fell in love with the area, eventually tore the cottage down, and built a home. We live here now. We love the community and we couldn’t be happier.
Buying the cottage was a massive inflection point in our lives that eventually led to a new community, lifestyle and place for our kids to grow up.
Did we get lucky? Absolutely, 100%.
But was there a lot of other stuff at play? I think so.
And that’s worth chewing on.
Mark Manson provides this framework for luck.
Heaven luck - the hand we’re dealt. Where we’re born, to whom, with what resources. We don’t control it. The only move available is gratitude and perspective.
Earth luck - where we live, the work we do, the people we surround ourselves with. This is an enormous lever many of us ignore. It’s not one decision so much as positioning. Expanding our luck surface area so good things have more ways to find us. Much of this is within our control.
Human luck - is how we play the cards we’re dealt. The specific decisions we make when an opportunity actually shows up.
When I run my cottage example through this lens it makes a lot more sense. And that’s the part worth holding onto as we look forward.
We can’t control the hand we’re dealt. But we can keep showing up, we can surround ourselves with smart and inspiring people, and we can make good decisions.
That’s the work.
Onward 🖤
Good Listen
Solved - Luck (Mark Manson & Drew Birnie, with Annie Duke)
A useful breakdown of the three-luck framework above, plus Richard Wiseman’s research on why people who believe they’re lucky tend to become luckier, and Annie Duke on making better decisions when the outcome is never guaranteed.