There’s a natural tendency amongst some to assume that when they see someone successful, it’s because they’ve been lucky in some way – they had wealthy parents or they inherited or won a sizeable sum of money. And, for some people this may be true, but how many times have we heard of children of wealthy parents going off the rails or squandering the family fortune, or people who win millions on the lottery ending up only a few short years later, back where they started? Considered from this angle, then it doesn’t look quite so lucky!
But as we know, luck isn’t actually luck at all, and as Seneca tells us…
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”.
Consider the recent London Olympics. How much could lucky-to-have ‘natural talent’ have contributed to the gold medals received by the winning athletes? Well there’s no doubt that these athletes are talented, but a much larger part of their success was due to the relentless work they put in in the years leading up to the Olympics.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success believes that we need to put in around 10,000 hours of practice in our chosen field to reach the highest levels of success. That’s a lot of time. To put this into context, we would need to practice for at least 4 hours a day, seven days a week for eight years to achieve the mastery that Gladwell is referring to! For most of us that seems completely out of the question, and in reality, without the support of our families, it’s unlikely that we could commit to that level of input at an early age. [Read more…] about Do You Need A Lucky Break?