Why saying your success is a result of luck is hurting future  Entrepreneurs

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Stop saying you got lucky!

In this day of entrepreneurs and increasingly successful people, we hear so much about the concept of luck. People who have been extremely successful say, “I just got lucky” and those that study the successful talk about how luck played a major role in their journey to success. However, I think you will find that most of the very successful people are mostly just modest about their success when giving luck and good timing more credit than it deserves.

Telling people that you just got lucky is doing more damage than good. After all, people look up to those that are successful and hearing that their strategy for success was luck is not very inspiring or anything they can use to template their own success.

We must stop telling others that our success was a result of luck even if luck did play a small part. We all know that luck is part of the success game but luck is a vexing concept and can be manipulated to work in our favor. Generally luck is a byproduct of work. A better way to talk about luck is to say, “I got lucky because I put in the work.”

Here are 5 concepts about luck that will get you to rethink how you handle your success

1. Why is the concept of luck so bad in our culture?

Raw luck has no strategy or method. Just saying “I got lucky” doesn’t give aspiring entrepreneurs anything they can use. You’re basically saying that you were just sitting in your house one day and opportunity knocked on your door. In today’s modern world, becoming super successful is more realistic for virtually anyone than it ever has before. No matter a person’s background or where they grew up anyone who wants to succeed now can. These new nomads of the entrepreneur world are looking for strategy and mindset to achieve their dreams. Hearing that luck played a huge part only discourages them.

2. The idea of luck reinforces the lottery mindset

In a previous article, we covered why the extreme winners in life are so different. One of those reasons was that they do not have the lottery mindset. The most successful among us believe in work, not playing the lottery or hoping to be successful. If you think about it, luck is a poverty mindset. Only the lower and middle classed play the lottery and buy scratch tickets. They are “Hoping” to hit the big numbers that will make them an overnight millionaire. But real millionaires play the work game. They bet on themselves rather than a government regulated lottery system that was sold to us to help school and fix potholes. Real entrepreneurs generally keep their money, lottery winners usually end up losing all their money.  

3. Luck can not be recreated 

Ask anyone who has achieved big in their life how they built their fortune and they will tell you that they suck with what worked and repeated the actions necessary to keep those successful results coming. They kept doing what was working and built on to it with new ideas to optimize it and grow it. How can you do that if your only claim to success was luck?  How do you repeat getting lucky so that you can continue to repeat it and grow? It is always best to talk about the work and the strategy.  New entrepreneurs don’t want to hear how you got lucky, they want a plan of action that you used that can actually help them realize their dreams.  

4. We all have luck

Whether you like it or not, we all have some level of luck in our lives. Opportunity is everywhere if you know what you are looking for. The only amount of “luck” in the success game is being lucky to have the idea. And even then, most successful people were in the ideas game long before they were in the success game. The successful are used to having ideas. They are idealistic by nature and are always thinking of something new or a new way to do something. An entrepreneur is generally never the inventor of a thing. They take old ideas and apply their personal brand to it and work to improve it. The lucky people are the ones that are creating their luck by working. The forces of nature always manifest in the things that are focused on the most. If you want to be lucky, manifest it by focusing on the success of your idea. Make your idea the dominating thoughts of your mind and luck will take care of the rest.  

5. The concept of luck eases the psyche

This is where the idea of luck does the most damage. In his book, The Genius in All of Us, David Shenk says,

“Everyone has the potential for genius, or at the very least, greatness. But the reason we prefer to believe that we’re either a genius or we’re not, or that we’re either talented or not, is because it relieves us from the responsibility of taking control of our own life. A belief in inborn gifts and limits is much gentler on the psyche: The reason you aren’t a great opera singer is because you can’t be one. That’s simply the way you were wired. Thinking of talent as innate makes our world more manageable, more comfortable. It relieves a person of the burden of expectation.”

It’s no different with the concept of luck. We believe we could never be lucky enough to be Elon Musk so why put in the work to try and achieve as greatly as he has?

So many new entrepreneurs are looking for guidance to become successful themselves. It’s more possible today than it’s ever been before. Technology has given so many first generation wealthy their start in building vast fortunes. While luck is playing its part in success, work, effort, drive, passion, and self-motivation is the catalyst for being lucky. The next time a young person asks you how you got successful, tell them about your work ethic and the long hours you spent hustling out a business. Tell them that you are lucky to be doing what you do but only because you were willing to put in the work.

Make your speeches about success to young people memorizing and intoxicating and show them that work is the secret to luck. Anyone can be lucky if they put in the effort to let luck into their lives. Luck has an affinity to effort. Make sure you are showing these young people the road to luck because we need these first-time entrepreneurs to be successful.