CREATING YOUR OWN LUCK
In today's society, where we're constantly trying to find ways to improve our lives, luck has become a popular topic. Luck is a tough nut to crack though, because there isn't just one definition of it: Luck is the idea that a person or event cannot be said to have been successful without luck. It can mean finding success in something that should have been impossible and relying on chance rather than skill for the outcome. So, on a day-to-day basis, there are many different kinds of luck that we experience. For example, when you get just the right parking spot in a crowded mall parking lot, or something like this happens to you:
One day I was driving on the highway near my home in New York. A truck suddenly changed lanes and cut me off. I veered away from it and then swerved back into my lane. The truck hit me again and pushed me off the road. My car became airborne for about 15 feet and then began to spin wildly; it rotated about three times before landing on its wheels in a snowbank. I was totally shaken up and stunned, but unharmed. I felt that I had been so lucky, because I was spared death. I thought to myself, "Wow. Well, what if it would have happened to me at work? What if I had been in a car accident?"
Yes, everyone is involved in a lot of minor and major car accidents every day. Why do you think so many people are killed on the highway? It could be because you're not paying attention, or perhaps there's also a psychic element to it. This accident illustrates for us how luck works on both a personal and professional level:
When we see things going very well with our work and our personal lives, we'll often credit ourselves with good luck. We might, for example, take a vacation we didn't have time for, or we might even go to a university that accepted us after we had failed the first time. But what if things turned out differently the next year? Or what if something that you wanted to happen this year happens next year? Is it really your own ability that makes you lucky when things go well?
As I was sitting in a cafe trying to write an article about luck, I suddenly thought of Rilke. If he were alive today and could read this article, would he think that he was lucky during his early days as a poet in Germany?
His father took sick and died shortly after his birth. His mother had no money and couldn't pay for his medical care, so he was sent to live with a foster family. This foster family didn't treat him kindly, and he was plagued by bad luck his whole life. He became a young artist in Munich, but because of the stress of being poor, he fell into a depression. When he began to write poems, they weren't well received by other artists at the time, who eventually left him out in the cold.
When Rilke was 43 years old and very depressed about his many misfortunes and failures as an artist, he finally re-discovered some poetry that had been written when he was twenty years old. It stopped him dead in his tracks. It was as if his own inner writer just fell out of the sky. He knew then that he was destined to be a great writer, and he devoted the rest of his life to writing some of the twentieth century's greatest poetry.
He came upon his "inner voice" during a time when he was in the pits of despair. At that time everything was going against him in his life, and it must have felt like there was no way out; however, this is exactly when you need something to believe in to get you through it all... And Rilke did find something. He had been writing poetry for a long time and he knew that he was good, so this inner voice came to him at the right moment. But how did he find it? It's a very interesting question.
Imagine that you're a doctor treating a patient in the hospital, and suddenly your patient recovers in an unexpected way. It seems as though it's almost magical; you know that there's no medical explanation for it, but how could something like this happen? It just happens sometimes, like magic. If you believe the theory of synchronicity proposed by Carl Jung, then everything is connected to everything else in some way or another.
So, what's the difference between luck, perseverance and destiny? It's all an illusion. Luck is more a state of mind, while perseverance is a result of our motivation to succeed. When it comes to the "magic" of synchronicity, we have this saying in Korea:
…대답하기 어려운 질문을 다시 반복하고 있는 것은
There's almost no difference that separates luck and destiny. If a student gets a good grade on a test, we might say that it was because he studied hard. If the student doesn't study enough, then he won't do well, and we'll say that it was because he wasn't lucky with his exam. This way of thinking is pervasive in our society, because it's an easy way to explain success or failure without having to think too hard about what really happened.
However, I think that everything has its reason and explanation; you don't just have to call it luck. You can keep on trying your hardest until you know exactly why something happens the way it does in life.
I've been teaching English in Korea for five years. It's a very difficult job, and I've even been robbed twice while I was on the subway. It hasn't scared me away from my job or led me to ask myself why it happened to me and not someone else, because disaster happens to everyone; it's just that some people are more likely to experience it than others. Even in my worst days at work, I always thought that everything would turn out alright in the end, so there was no point in worrying about it too much.
When something bad happens to us, we wonder why these things always happen to us when we least expected them. It seems like someone is playing a game with us, but we always have the choice to walk away from the game instead of continuing to play it. Our attitude and the way we think about life greatly affect our success and happiness.
How do you choose to see bad luck? Do you give up and become paralyzed? Or do you feel lucky because you were able to overcome your hardships? If you had a very difficult childhood, you can still come out as a successful person in this world. You might ask yourself why this always seems to happen to people with messed-up childhoods, but that's just another way of looking at it; it's not necessarily true.
You miss 100 percent of the shots that you don't take.
Conclusion
There are so many ways to look at luck. You might think that you are lucky or unlucky, but there is often an explanation for what happens in our lives. We create the world, then we give it meaning, and then we expect things to happen based on that meaning; however, the result of all of this is nothing more than a grand illusion.
Well-known writer Raymond Chandler said: "When I'm good, I'm very good; but when I'm bad, I'm better." It's easier to be bad than good because it's all about your attitude towards life.
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CREATING YOUR OWN LUCK