#sparkchamber 082619 — Make Your Own Luck Day
This year, the best day of the year happens to fall on #sparkchamber Monday: today is make your own luck day! Luck is an interesting concept. While by definition luck is achieving success or failure through chance rather than through action, by experience there’s more to it than that. The relationship between preparation and luck is oft noted — to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the harder you work, the more luck you have. It’s more transactional than random. Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
But it also goes a level deeper, and that’s what this day is all about. Beyond being in the right place at the right time, or being ready for that moment when opportunity knocks, luck is always in play. Like gravity, luck is an invisible, ever-present force. Luck is a magnetic field that aligns to and intensifies the energy around it. Thoughts, beliefs, perceptions are energized, magnified, reinforced, strengthened. When it comes back around, it might feel random — like good luck or bad luck. But it’s really just a natural conclusion. Entrepreneur Henry Ford who said, whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right, and actor Chris Pine who said, I believe in luck and fate and I believe in karma, that the energy you put out in the world comes back to meet you are both saying the same thing — we make our own luck. Which is celebrated today!
Here’s how to do it. Listen to what you’re telling yourself inside your head. Change your mind if you don’t like what you hear. Set a constant reminder — a rubber band around your wrist, a pebble in your shoe, a good-luck charm in your pocket — to keep listening, and to keep overriding thoughts that go off course. Be open to possibility. Make room for the unexpected [editor’s note, some of the best naming ideas started with a typo]. Allow for it. Let it be.
This is author Gretchen Rubin’s trick: I have a lucky perfume. I love beautiful smells, but I save one of my favorite perfumes to wear only when I feel like I need some extra luck.
Today is the day! Believe in it. When it comes to luck, you make your own. [Bruce Springsteen]
1.] Where do ideas come from?
The best way to predict the future is to invent it — Alan Kay, computer-science pioneer
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
You will miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take — Wayne Gretzky, greatest hockey player ever
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it — Jimmy Dean, country music singer turned sausage entrepreneur
4.] How do you know when you are done?
Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality — Eliyahu Goldratt, process-management guru
