Finding Luck in Unlikely Places
Life isn’t fair. Some people face incredibly tough situations that can feel impossible to overcome. Earthquakes, floods, fires, wars, and pandemics can turn your world upside down. Additional challenges come in many forms including genetic predispositions, serious health problems, complicated family dynamics, financial struggles, and physically and/or emotionally toxic environments. The playing field isn’t level, and some of us must fight much harder just to get by. For some, even the simplest goals — like feeling safe, staying healthy, or finding stability — feel out of reach. Plus, there are systemic cultural biases that can work against you. The deck is stacked.
For eight years, I volunteered at San Quentin State Prison, in northern California, helping the men in The Last Mile program prepare for a life after incarceration by teaching them skills related to entrepreneurship. Hearing their individual stories was heartbreaking. Most of these men started life in terrible circumstances, with poverty, addiction, and abuse. They lacked hope and direction, and made destructive choices, including joining gangs, to find support in a troubled community. It was only later in life, during their incarceration, that they learned how to identify and make positive choices, and to harness the opportunities in their midst.
In contrast, some people seem to win the birth lottery, blessed with beauty, brains, education, money, and/or connections. They have a head start in life, often unaware that their advantages stem from privileges they didn’t earn themselves. As football coach Barry Switzer quipped, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” This baseball analogy captures how easy it is to mistake fortune for merit. Privilege can make people oblivious to the struggles of others and obscure the role that good fortune has played in their own success. Privilege — aka good fortune — can create blind spots that diminish empathy and sensitivity to the challenges faced by those who were not born into equally fortunate circumstances, and how their privilege has influenced their trajectory.
Even when the world treats you badly, you get to choose how to respond. Your choices, in turn, shape how the world will respond to you. We are each locked in a continuous dance with the world in which we tradeoff who is leading, and who is following. Capturing luck is about learning how to lead in your dance with life: how to take charge, and how to harness cause and effect. Viktor Frankl, the famous psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor, wrote about how he endured his horrific wartime circumstances in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, originally published in German in 1946. He wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
In the direst situations there are often opportunities. It is up to you to find them. Those possibilities don’t have red flashing neon signs identifying them, and nobody will tell you when you walk right past them. Instead, over time, if you don’t harness the luck in your environment, you won’t reach your goals, and other individuals will seem to have all the luck.
What luck can you find hidden in plain sight?
