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This is why I have incredible luck
- Escrito por NelsonQuest
- July 12, 2022
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Luck is a funny thing. On the surface, it’s a relatively harmless concept, most often associated with leprechauns, four leaf clovers, and finding an onion ring mixed in with your french-fries.
But try to talk about ‘luck’ and the role that it plays in success with others, and you’re likely to end up in an argument.
Because some people have good luck and others have bad luck. Some people make their own luck and others believe that luck is completely out of their own hands.
As a successful entrepreneur with beautiful and intelligent wife – a beautiful albeit somewhat less intelligent dog – and as someone who has reached a point where I basically have no financial worries and at pretty much all times I’m doing cool stuff that I enjoy –
I think it’s fair to say that I’m a lucky son of a bitch, but how much of a role did ‘luck’ play in my success? How much of a role does it play in the success of others?
For as much as people love to debate these questions, i think what actually matters is this:
There is absolutely an art to maximizing luck – I’m living proof – and it’s precisely the reason why most successful people, if they lost everything and had to start over, would probably find success again.
This art begins by understanding the 4 different types of luck and how to maximize for each of them – and it ends by integrating this knowledge within one simple zen principle that guarantees luck in virtually every imaginable situation.
So let’s dive in!
The 4 Different Types of Luck
In his book ‘Chase, Chance, and Creativity’, originally published in 1978 – Dr James Austin divides ‘Luck’ into 4 different categories based on the amount of influence that we have over them.
1. Blind Luck
This first type of luck is the completely serendipitous kind – it’s completely accidental and requires no effort on our part.
This is like when you order take-out and they accidentally give you two of everything, or like when someone robs a bank at gunpoint, murders everyone, and then as they’re fleeing in their getaway car, a crip $5 bill falls out right in front of you and nobody else is around to notice.
Did I mention that blind luck can be good or bad?
Anyway, this may come as a surprise, but we can actually maximize our luck here – which you’ll understand towards the end of the video where we discuss the zen principle.
2. Luck By Consequence of Action
This is the sort of luck that happens through consistent effort and persistence towards the things we care about.
When we’re running around all day working on different things, engaging with different people, and pulling on lots of different threads, we will naturally create lots of potentially ‘lucky’ opportunities.
5 years ago, my friend and former employee invited me on a short motorcycle trip so that we could get to know each other.
While riding through the beautiful hills of Colombia, I mentioned to her this idea I had to start a YouTube channel, and that’s where she introduced me to her ex-boyfriend Stalin, who has been working with me ever since (and is the guy who edited the video made with this article).
The whole reason I even live in Colombia is because because EIGHT years ago while making small-talk with someone I wanted to do business with – he helped me realize that, now that i had started my own online business, I was technically ‘location independent’ –
He sent me an invite to join a forum with other location-independent entrepreneurs located all over the world – and that’s how I started traveling through South America, living with different groups of these guys in every country I visited, until I eventually bunkered down in Medellin so that I could focus on growing my business.
To maximize this type of luck, the key is massive action in the direction of new people and opportunities.
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3. Luck When Preparation Meets Opportunity
This is the sort of luck that only a select individual can detect, owing to their unique combination of skills and experience, combined with a unique circumstance.
Dr Austin gives a great example of this with the story of Alexander Fleming – the man who accidentally made one of the most important medical discoveries in human history: penicillin.
While researching bacteria, he accidentally left a petri dish with bacteria near a window, causing it to become contaminated with mold.
He would have thrown it out, except 6 years earlier, while dealing with a cold, some of his nasal liquids made their way into another bacteria filled petri dish where he noticed that the bacteria around the nasal liquid were dying.
This led him to discover ‘lysozyme’ – and while this discovery wasn’t a massive medical break-through, this experience is what prompted him to investigate the mold-filled petri dish, where he noticed that similarly, the bacteria around the mold was dying.
On further inspection of the mold, which was from the ‘Penicillium’ genus, he discovered that it was some sort of ‘juice’ from this mold which had killed the bacteria.
He gave this ‘mold juice’ a name: penicillin.
So through a complete accident that he was uniquely qualified to identify and capitalize on, he discovered something that has since saved millions of lives – earning him a Nobel prize in Medicine in 1945 and recognition as one of Time Magazine’s most important people of the 20th century.
People who are masters in their craft develop an ability that I like to call ‘seeing in the gray’ – whereby they can see opportunities that nobody else can.
I run a business that sells websites to real estate agents, and I’ve invested thousands of hours towards becoming one of the best. I can now see into the gray.
I’ve also lived through a few global catastrophes, and I’ve noticed that whenever the world descends into chaos, massive short-term opportunities are created.
In 2020 when a global pandemic swept the world, the real estate market tanked, and real estate agents, now unable to conduct business, were eager to cut expenses.
Most of our competitors lost clients, however I saw a global pandemic as the perfect opportunity for agents to direct their newfound free time towards building a strong digital presence, with a website being the central ‘hub’.
I worked quickly to create webinars, case studies, and aggressive marketing to push the value in this approach, and it was the biggest home-run we ever hit.
While our competitors were suffering, we nearly doubled in size, and the investments our clients made paid off big as soon as they were able to start selling real estate again.
I was the right person, with the right amount of experience, at the right time, who took the right actions.
To maximize the type of luck, the key is to get exceptionally good at something while also simultaneously accumulating life experience – then, when you identify an opportunity, you’ll feel it in your gut, and you must act on it.
4. Luck by Creating Invisible Doors
This is the sort of luck that finds us because of who we are and the sort of reputation we’ve cultivated for ourselves, and it’s the literal embodiment of the famous quote “if you build it, they will come.”
A great example of this are popular YouTube channels. The bigger a YouTube channel gets, and the more authority it commands in a particular space or niche, the more that people and businesses seek them out to present them with opportunities.
As my channel has grown in popularity, I get all sorts of offers – product promotion, new businesses, offers to work for me.
Many years ago when my first channel was taking off, I had a guy from Dubai offer me $100k to get his YouTube channel to 100k subscribers.
I declined this offer because promoting vanity as happiness doesn’t align with my own values, but it was still super cool to get an offer like that out of the blue.
I’ve actually hired and worked with lots of fans of my channel – some of you guys may remember the story of Rafael, who flew from Germany to Medellin to deliver a book he had written for me using my content – he ended up working for my company in sales and he was fantastic.
Federico, who has a really popular film reviews channel, was another fan who reached out to me pretty recently, and he’s now in charge of everything from video ideas, to my social media, to our newsletter.
To maximize this type of luck, the key is to get exceptionally good at something, and then build a strong reputation around it.
The Zen Principle of ‘Good Luck’ In Every Circumstance
The illustrate this principle, I’d like to share the following story from Alan Watts:
Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse. All the neighbors came around that evening and said “that’s too bad” and the farmer replied: Maybe.
The next day the horse came back with 7 wild horses. Alll the neighbors came around again and said “that’s great” and the farmer said “maybe.”
The next day his son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses and was thrown and broke his leg, and all the neighbors came around and said “well that’s too bad” and the farmer said “maybe.”
The next day army recruiters came around looking for young people, and they rejected the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. All the neighbors came around and said “well isn’t that wonderful?”, and the farmer said “maybe.”
“It is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequences of a misfortune, or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.” – Alan Watts
Summary
The four types of luck are:
- Blind luck, which is completely accidental.
- Luck by Consequence of action, which happens as we consistently apply action towards things we believe will move us forward
- Luck When Preparation Meets Opportunity, whereby the right person, with the right opportunity, is able to capitalize on a unique opportunity
And then finally:
- Luck by Creating invisible doors, whereby we get lucky because of the public reputation we’ve developed
Conclusion
I’ve gotten ‘unlucky’ thousands of times, over and over and over again, and at least to-date, there is not a single one of those unlucky scenarios that hasn’t ended up being a blessing.
Friends I’ve lost, people who have betrayed my trust, relationships that have failed, non-stop health issues and injuries, huge business losses & legal issues –
I’ve learned from and grown every single one of them. And while Alan watts observed that we never know what consequences will be of bad luck or good luck.
What I’ve observed is that we can interpret every type of ‘luck’ as good luck by committing ourselves to grow and evolve as a consequence to every single thing that happens to us.
I’m one of the luckiest people in the world because every single thing that happens to me results in something better. Always.
Alright guys – so if you’re feeling lucky that you clicked onto this article today, can you return the favor and give the video a like?
In the comments, I’d most like to hear from people who are already able to see themselves as ‘lucky’ in every circumstance, and what sort of effect that’s had on your life.
To see how lucky I am in real life, follow me on Instagram @nelsonquest.
Check out nelsonquest.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter and to grab a free copy of ‘Dark Mode’ – my isolation based productivity system.
Unless, of course… you’re one of those people who spends most of their day in comment sections complaining about how everyone more successful than them got lucky.
Of all the reasons that I am lucky, I think I am most lucky to no longer see the world that way.
This is the path.
¡Mantente
al día!
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