Are You Lucky?

2026 edit: I wrote this twenty years ago, but it captures something I still believe—luck isn’t something that happens to you, it’s a skill you develop. The “wandering eye” I describe here is what I now think of as pattern recognition: the ability to see connections others miss. In building ChainAlign, I’ve learned that systems can help surface these opportunities, but the skill of recognizing them remains deeply human.

Some time back I had written about Good to Great by Jim Collins. One characteristic the research found was that leaders of great companies tended to cite luck as a key factor in their success. The control group (companies under similar circumstances that didn’t achieve greatness) had leaders who also talked about luck, but this time it was bad luck.

Collins goes on to discuss what makes a company great, bringing some sense to this role of luck at the organizational level. This left me wondering: what about us as individuals? I tend to consider myself very lucky, especially when it comes to my career.

What is this concept of luck that we find refuge in when things go wrong, and perhaps not as often when things go right?

I was having one of those heated discussions with a colleague, and some thoughts crystallized.

The right place at the right time

I’ve read quite a few biographies, mostly relevant from a business point of view: Alfred Sloan, Jack Welch, Akio Morita, William Boeing, and so on. Some mention luck, but they were all at the right place at the right time.

Or were they?

Yes, they were. But I think all of us are at the right place at the right time quite a large number of times. Those who are lucky just seem to be able to seize that opportunity.

These chance opportunities: lucky people have them and unlucky people don’t. Not because they don’t exist for the unlucky ones, but because they don’t make use of them.

The wandering eye

To be lucky, you must use these chance opportunities. And to do this, you must somehow be capable of seeing them.

This is where a new skill is required: having a wandering eye.

Many of us miss chance opportunities because we’re looking for something specific, or just something else entirely. Lucky people see what is there rather than just what they’re looking for.

This is where heterogeneity of experience helps: from personal experience, from reading, from others. It helps us see many more opportunities we would have otherwise missed.

Adding variety helps. Changing habitual patterns. Taking a different route to work before an important meeting now makes sense. Not just as superstition, perhaps!

Seizing internal opportunities

These opportunities need not always be external occurrences. It could be an idea that comes to your head while lying in the tub taking a warm bath, or while traveling on the train to work.

We need to seize that idea and build upon it.

Many exceptional success stories, on observation, fall into this category. I’m reading Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson right now, and this is very much the case with him.

The spin you give it

Moving beyond, we all have opportunities that we see and even seize, but not all of them materialize. I’m sure this is true whether you’re lucky or not.

But if you’re the lucky kind, you would give what actually happened a positive spin, rather than grieving over what might or should have happened.

It’s like the finals of a tennis tournament. The winner of the bronze medal match feels much more upbeat than the silver medalist who just lost the final. But if you’re a lucky person, you might actually have the sense to be happy that you won the silver medal, and be happier than the bronze medalist.

Or if you’ve met with an accident. I just finished watching Lost - where a few passengers survive an aircraft crash. Are these survivors lucky to be alive or unlucky to have gotten on that damn aircraft in the first place?

Your answer to this question might tell you if you’re lucky or not.