Leveraging Luck

“But you just got lucky!”

These are five words nobody wants to hear after they achieve something. After all, you worked hard on this thing! You had clever ideas that contributed to the ultimate success, and you lost sleep in making sure the event ran flawlessly. Sure, you were given an opportunity, but not everyone would have done what you did with such an opportunity.

“Equality of opportunity” is an incredibly noble idea, and probably a reasonable ultimate goal for society. It’s definitely not here right now, as I stressed in winning the uterine lottery.

But in spite of not everyone having the same opportunities, in fact all of us have some opportunities.

In other words, we all get lucky.

I want to talk about what to do when this inevitably happens—how to prepare for it, how to recognize it, and what to do when you get lucky.

What differentiates people who “level up” in their circumstances from those who do not is not just the appearance of luck, but the ability to leverage it when it …