“I don’t believe in getting lucky – I make my own luck” – haven’t we come across that statement too often? Doesn’t it sound so empowering? Makes you believe that you are really the only one in charge of your destiny. You can fight against all the odds and get to be absolutely whatever you want.

But then, is it truly so?

I woke up today, finished my day’s work at office, wrote up this article and published it. Why? Because I was willing to write this today, and did everything right in order to make that happen – correct? Well, yes. But then it is quite easy to take this for granted – that ‘I wanted to do something and I did it’. When we think of it that way we are also conveniently forgetting everything that could have gone wrong which could’ve stopped me from doing this here right now. There was a chance that I could’ve met with a terrible accident today while driving due to someone else’s fault, or I could have been forced to evacuate my place without any belongings due to a nearby wildfire – or any other unforeseen event that I don’t really have control over.

Life is, to very simplistically put it, a lot like the game of snakes and ladders. You start from nothing, and keep playing until you hit the other end of the board – the final destination. In every turn, you roll the die, see what number comes up, and take those many steps towards the goal. In other words, you take the opportunity to try your chance, and play by the rules of chance and go where it takes you. On this path you have ladders which can suddenly advance you towards the goal, and then there are snakes which can suddenly pull you back closer to where you started. When you roll the die you have no control over the number that shows up – it’s totally a matter of chance. But it still needs your effort and action to roll the die – something you do out of your own will and choice. So let’s say I played a round of this game and won, now should I say – “hey, I just happened to get the right numbers and won, I just got lucky there, I hardly did anything”, or should I say “it is because of my effort to roll the die that I came all this way and won, I made my own luck”? Well, why not a mix of both? Because eventually that’s what all things in life are – part chance and part choice. 

You finally landed your dream job after months of preparation – yes, you did thorough research on what that company worked on, you went out of your way to add projects to your portfolio that align with their work, you did a deep dive study of all the probable topics that would be discussed in the interview, you answered everything correctly and with confidence. But was that all that landed you that job? If the previous guy hadn’t left there may not have been a job opening in the first place. Or maybe someone else better was offered the role earlier who turned it down, and it then came to you. Or maybe as soon as you got the offer there was a big layoff in the company which made them retract the offer. There are a hundred other reasons that could have stopped you from getting that job, in spite of all the efforts that you put. And these are factors that you have no control over whatsoever.

And at the end of the day all factors have to come together for something favorable to happen – both factors that you can control, which count as your effort, and those which you cannot, which count as luck. Mind you, it’s not 50-50, the proportion varies vastly from one situation to another. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a theist who attributes things beyond your control to an entity called “God” or if you’re an atheist who attributes the same to the general randomness of the universe – either way, the undisputed fact is that there are simply things beyond you that influence the outcome of your actions, either positively or negatively. In most cases, more the effort you put towards something, more is the likelihood of the outcome turning in your favor. And this makes people who have put a great deal of effort toward something feel that they worked really hard to turn the odds in their favor, thus ‘making their own luck’ or ‘defining their own destiny’. Maybe the math nerd in you can appreciate the statement below better (which I’m only making up with my infinitesimal understanding of both life and calculus) :

See, that equals sign can be really misleading if you don’t know how to read that statement. It does NOT mean that if you put maximum efforts, the role of luck in your success is zero. It means that the luck factor tends to zero as your effort tends to infinity. And thanks to the inherent nature of mortality you can never reach a point of infinite effort in your finite human form, which means luck can never become zero. No matter how much efforts we put, we are only making the favorable outcome more likely to happen, but will never get to an absolute hundred percent confidence, as there is always something that can go wrong to make things work against our favor. If we attribute our success solely to our own efforts then we may fall trap to the Dunning-Kruger effect, and if we attribute it entirely to luck then we may suffer from the imposter syndrome. 

We often hear people make statements like – “oh, I had to really work my butt off to get to where I am today, unlike that other guy who just got lucky”. Maybe if we all call a spade a spade and acknowledge the contribution of both effort and luck to success – ours as well as other’s, then the world might be a slightly better place to live.

In the end, it’s not a debate of how many snakes we ran into or how many ladders the others ran into, what matters most is the question – did you pick up the die and roll it today?