My 1st Million At 33 – yes, you can do it too

The best definition of lucky is probably by Seneca, a Roman philosopher in the mid-1st century AD:

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

If you studies the components of a lucky event, there are basically three: preparation, meeting, opportunity. Without any of the three components, a person cannot get “lucky”. For most of the successfully people, they usually emphasize the first two components: preparation & meeting. They obviously have worked hard to prepare themselves, and often sought actively after opportunities. For the others, they may only see the part of meeting & opportunity, and not realize that preparation is also essential to a lucky event. And for them, the part on meeting is more of a random lucky event, rather than the result of a pro-active search. Often, the biggest difference between successful people and others that are not so successful is that the successful people don’t leave things to random luck. Because of their strong wills to succeed, they will continually seek for opportunities, and in the process, learn how to prepare and adapt themselves to the changing marketplace. Eventually, once they have sufficient preparation and adapted themselves well to fill in the niche of their marketplace, success follows naturally.

Granted, there are always elements of randomness in the process of achieving success. To have a good preparation, the person must have an environment for him to develop the necessary abilities. The background environment is given to him, as part of the “luck”. And due to randomness, some people get to their opportunities effortless, while some others may take decades (or even never) to meet their BIG opportunity. And at last, the types of opportunities are dependent upon the geographic location and the changing time. It is simply impossible for Yahoo, Ebay or Google to exist before the invention of computers. Likewise, it is impossible for personal computers to exist before semiconductors and integrated circuits (IC) are developed. However in every age of the time and every place on Earth, there are always some sort of opportunities whether it exists already or yet needs to be imagined/invented. And the visible or invisible opportunities simply awaits for their rightful owners to come at the right place and at the ripe time.

To meet the opportunity and arrive at its final success, besides the random luck, the only way is to tirelessly endeavor oneself through countless tries. The success is then the final resolution of an unlikily probabilistic event. There are several things that you can do things to increase your odds:

1. Increase the number of attempts, and maintains an optimistic attitude.
2. Modify your methods to adapt to the current opportunity to better the chance of every try.
3. Change your target of opportunity and find something that you are more likely to succeed in.  (Don’t be too hard on yourself.  Occasionally, there comes a time when the world doesn’t change for you, but you can change your target.)

One thing is for sure. If you don’t ever try, you can never succeed. Drifting purposelessly to wait for something good to happen is truly leaving your fate to your luck, the random luck.

By the way, make sure while you endeavor, endeavor responsibly by taking care of your family needs.