When Preparation Meets Opportunity

I imagine most of us are familiar with the quote from?the Roman philosopher Seneca?“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”?While Seneca lived from 4BC – 65AD, he and his circle of friends had a good pulse on the meaning of life’s events and luck as a topic. At the core, Seneca’s work demonstrated his belief that luck isn’t random at all, in fact it’s created!?

The definition of luck is?“success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions.”?This means that being lucky is just as most of us think about it – happening randomly, without us planning on it, operating with intent, or any creation of our own. In fact, I’ve been known to tell my direct reports often,?success without a plan or intent is simply luck.?And here we are, staring down the end of 2022, thinking about our goals and our new year resolutions that were set in the romance and fun of last January while toasting to another new year! Many are privately banking on some good luck to bump them over the edge to success against those great plans set nearly a year ago.

Not us! We, as astute observers and tactical operators of our 2022 pursuits are not banking on luck!?We have been preparing, learning, growing, and challenging ourselves for month – preparing for this opportunity that December 12-31st?provides! We have been doing things like?trying hard things and resetting after failure,?practicing gratitude,?making intentional choices that remove friction for the sake of success,?investing in “the middle” of our efforts, and?outworking everyone! We have been employing?aggressive patience to not waste any moments, while carefully leveraging our own boards of advisors, coaches, mentors and feedback partners to improve 1% more each day. We have been waiting for this moment to tackle the final, most critical moments of our year – leaning into the intensity and challenge of the remaining few weeks to take the closing steps against our goals!?Below are a few ways to help bring all this hard-earned preparation into this beautiful end-of-year opportunity to create our own luck:

Ruthlessly Remove Distractions -?Distraction is the enemy of success, allowing trivial and unimportant things to get in the way of what truly matters. Keeping a keen eye on our goals, while deferring, deprioritizing, and suspending the items that don’t lend themselves to advancing our progress is critical. I like to use this framework to decide if something is necessary or a distraction:

1. Does?[insert potential distraction]?directly tie into reaching my goal? If ‘no’, see #2
2. Does?[insert potential distraction]?support one of the critical activities needed to advance to my goal? If ‘no’, see #3
3. Does?[insert potential distraction]?support one of my core values as I try to?be an example? If ‘no’, see #4
4. Does?[insert potential distraction]?help me grow in my broader ambitions? If ‘no’, eliminate the distraction all together or deprioritize/defer the distraction to a later time and run it through these questions again.

Celebrate Frequently -?Celebration is that charge of pleasure that supports the continued investment in stretching and challenging ourselves. The metaphor?“we cannot pour from an empty cup”?specifically comes into play when we are bringing a full year’s worth of preparation and investment into pushing until the end of a goal. With all the focus and removal of distractions, it can be really hard to remember to celebrate our progress in addition to pressing for further advancement. From someone who fails at this regularly, we must take those frequent moments to celebrate and appreciate progression to our goals. We’ve earned it???

Keep the End in Mind -?Just like a GPS keeps the destination in mind without failure, we too must keep our ultimate goals in mind. Of course, lesser goals should stack up to reach the larger goal, but we may find that as the circumstances surrounding us change, our lesser goals may need to be re-evaluated and sometimes even adjusted. This also serves as a reminder that we should never sacrifice our long-term vision for our short-term gains. So, as we sprint to the end of 2022, we must stay vigilant and clearly aware of what all our short-term wins are adding up to. If that’s not aligned with broader goal, we need to go back to our first section,?Ruthlessly Removing Distractions.

While Seneca may have lived over 1,900 years ago, he and his philosopher friends had a pretty good idea about this thing called ‘luck’! After all, we’re still pressing deep into those core concepts today, and many of the most successful people in the world have innately attached their approaches to winning to that ancient philosophy. As with most of the years in each of our lives, 2022 has delivered no shortage of twists, turns, and challenges; but we are prepared, and we are ready to tackle the opportunity we find ourselves in!?

Good luck???