Luck or right positioning (1)

Life does not give us what we want but what we demand, neither will life just drop what we want on our laps by luck. “Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Many people think luck is a very important ingredient to success in life but we must have a right perspective of luck.

“Psychologist Richard Wiseman argues that luck is the outcome of human interaction with chance: Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences.” Dennis Whittle

One of the greatest sources of failure and frustration in life is wrong positioning and not necessarily being unlucky. When someone is wrongly positioned, he cannot be reached by those who need him and, he too, can never maximize his potentials. A good illustration of wrong positioning is the common Yoruba saying that says when a hen flies and perches on a rope – both the hen and the rope are inconvenienced. Wrong positioning leads to serious inconveniences. If we are going to make our lives count we must be properly positioned.

Positioning is a responsibility we have to shoulder personally and this will demand doing whatever it will take.

“Smart people put themselves in the right places all the time in hopes of finding opportunity. They do that because, while it may be hard to know when the time is right, we can make educated guesses about which places are right.” Joe Grimm

Proper positioning starts with right mental positioning, that is, have a right mental attitude. Attitude is the settled way we think – the way we see things. If our thinking is warped it will wrongly position us and constitute a hindrance to us. When we have a wrong attitude we will attribute opportunities and success to luck. People do not succeed by luck. Luck, as is commonly said, is when preparation meets opportunity.

“We can make ourselves luckier by changing our outlooks: Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.”