Luck can be best defined as “When Preparation Meets Opportunity”

Preparation

Preparation is the sum of everything you have assimilated to this point in life.  It consists of two parts:

      1)   Formal Education.  Consider this not so much as just the progression through the various degree-type levels of the education system, but as the time you have studied something so that you understand the subject.  Included: Independent Reading and Research, Apprenticeship, School, Trade School, etc.

      2)   Experience.  Living life day-to-day with curiosity and awareness of everything around you.  If you stay curious and aware, you will internalize what you live, but maybe with questions.  Answer your own questions!

As time passes, your formal education provides the background you draw on to better understand your experiences and grow.  Stay curious, keep learning, and everything combines to prepare you to identify an opportunity when you see one.

Opportunity

Picture a car driving along a road.  Consider that as a single circumstance.  Now picture the car coming to an intersection in a downtown area.  Suddenly several other single circumstances are coming together.  As we go through the intersection, we and everyone around us create a “set of circumstances”.  Now take a look at the very familiar phrase in quotation marks again.  Living life is your circumstance, as it is for each individual.  All of your interactions with your environment and individuals around you break and create sets of circumstances all the time. 

Okay, picture everything in motion as time moves forward.  Mainly by random, we can find ourselves in a set of circumstances that includes an opportunity we are capable and willing to take advantage of.  If we are prepared to identify that opportunity, we are prepared to act.

Luck

Awareness, asking questions, and studying for answers prepares us to identify opportunities that life presents. When we find ourselves in a set of circumstances that contain an opportunity, preparation allows us to rapidly identify it as an opportunity.  Alas, identifying opportunities in life is a difficult talent to hone, but to those that do, it always seems to others that person is just lucky.

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