I’ve always felt “unlucky”.
I can’t grab stuffed items in claw machines, I don’t win lotteries or Bingo, and I’ve lost hard wrestling and golf matches.
That’s how I felt until a mentor once told me that “luck” is nothing more than extremely hard preparation meeting the right opportunity at the right time. “Lucky” people are able to seize an opportunity at the time it presents.
But appearances can be deceiving right. They’ve prepared. They know what the opportunity looks like, and they realize what they can exploit and how, and they understand what success looks like.
This really liberated me, and essential to all of the success I’ve had over the past couple decades. Why? Because being prepared is in my control! And having faith is in my control. Keep preparing, pushing, developing, until it’s time to go, then go aggressively! It is now a process, not probability.
And sure, probability does play a role, but it’s far less than the role preparation plays.
Get prepared. Be steely eyed. Stay a bit hungry. Then pounce! Win. Be “lucky”.
“Mentorship”. It’s like a force of nature! When attentive, wise mentors apply the right amounts of pressure at the right times in the right places needed by a chunk of coal, in time it can become an exquisite, highly valuable diamond. It helped me many times in
Oxford’s online dictionary defines “capability” as “the power or ability to do something” and “the extent of someone’s ability”. That last part is interesting to me, and represents something a critical mentor to me once explained… “Capability” he said, “is the combination of being able to do something,
I keep a document to which I add my favorite quotes as I come across ones that really resonate with me. After watching the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill in Orlando, Florida this past weekend, I heard a fantastic one attributed to the King, golf legend Arnold Palmer.
