Luckily I am so lucky

Chatting with one of you the other day over a Kopi C (that’s coffee with evaporated milk for my dear non-Singaporean readers) made me realize that you might have gained the wrong perception of me.

You might believe that due to my early retirement from corporate life, or my daily posts or my articles on LinkedIn (this is my 100th article) I might be somehow skilled in something.

Sorry to disappoint you all.

Where I am now in my life and my early retirement is not a tale of great skills or investing glories. It’s merely a story of stumbles and falls (in regards to my stock picking skills). My nest egg is mainly actively earned income combined with some frugal spending and extrapolated by the magic of compounding.

And lots of dumb luck!

Those stories we tell ourselves

We humans love to tell stories to ourselves and others about past successes being the result of skill rather than luck.

I am human too and thus have written very little about all of those lucky events in my life.

Don’t ask me to mention them all here. The post would get excruciatingly long.

What I am getting at is that we rarely recognize the role luck played in our past. We are inherently biased against noticing the number of random events in our lives and their impact on us.

That’s why the role of luck is so vastly underrepresented in the biographies of famous people. We just don’t like to boast about our luck. We feel much better boasting about our skills and hard work.

Come on, let’s be honest here, where you are right now is purely due to luck.

Before you slump back with frustration and ask yourself “why do I work so hard when ultimately my ‘success’ would depend so much on luck?” let me share another observation:

Preparation is the key to having good luck. And lots of it. 

You see, becoming lucky can be trained.

Luck is a skill

It is an acquired skill based on certain traits. “Lucky people” share traits that tend to make them luckier than others.

1)     They accept the fact that in our random world not everything is planable.

2)     They take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way.

3)     They pay attention to what’s happening around them and, therefore, are able to extract greater value from each situation.

4)     They are open to novel opportunities and willing to try things outside of their usual experiences.

5)     They are much more likely to start conversations with people while standing in a queue because they know – whether consciously or not – that the greater the number of contacts they have with others, the more likely it is that one of them will lead to something good.

6)     For the same reason they are willing to interact with people who are different from themselves.

7)     They make more eye contact and smile more frequently, leading to more positive and extended encounters.

8)     They find ways to extract positive outcomes from the worst situations.

9)     They find unusual ways to use and recombine their knowledge and experiences.

Simply being observant, open-minded, friendly, and optimistic invites luck your way. Of course, topped off with sprinkles of smart-working and perseverance.

And then certainly the old rule still applies “90% of success in life is just showing up”.

Don’t hide in your shell, don’t bury your face in your smartphone when there is a networking opportunity. Show up, participate, approach people, chit chat, ask questions, listen more than you talk and learn from others.

Because every day is an adventure even though you might not realize the specifics of it until years later.

Feel free to share some of your reflections about your lucky moments in life in the comments section below. I guarantee you that you will feel more grateful and healthier after having written them down.