Making Your Own Luck

Why anticipating success increases your chances of achieving it

The high status mentality is one of abundance. You expect something and so you gain something. The mechanics of why this works are unintuitive at first glance. In reality, your disposition towards abundance is also not just a series of beliefs, but a part of your very identity.

– Omega Journey

One summer, about 25 years ago, I was playing for a very good U.S. soccer team with my brother, who is ten years younger and was the captain of his college team at the time. The team was full of very good players, including an Irish striker as well as the leading scorer from my brother’s high school team, who scored 32 goals his senior season.

Needless to say, I was the third option up front, being less skilled and what then felt considerably older than the two starters.

One game, the Irish guy couldn’t make it, so I started and played the entire 90 minutes. The grass was unusually long that day, for some reason, and it really interfered with our fast-breaking, pass-heavy style, so the game was scoreless until one point in the second half, when a through pass went too fast and too far, right toward the keeper.

Even though I had no chance to reach the ball, I continued running straight at him, and when he kicked the ball to clear it, I jumped into the air holding both my legs tightly pressed together. The ball hit me just under the knees and ricocheted past the keeper directly into the goal. 1-0.

Now where did that darned ball go?

As we jogged back to our side for the post-goal reset and my teammates congratulated me, one of them commented that it had been a lucky bounce.

“Luck?” I snapped back at him. “That had nothing to do with luck! I’ve been doing that for 15 years and it finally paid off!”

It was absolutely true. Since junior high, I’d always tried to block the clearance attempts by the goalies, and while I’d occasionally managed to deflect one, that was the first time I managed to block it right into the goal. It wasn’t luck, it was pure persistence over time that created that goal.

And that’s what you have to do if you want to make your mark when you are less skilled, less experienced, or less talented. You have to work harder. You have to persist longer.

You have to make your own luck.

At the end of the season, I had averaged one goal per game, which is top-tier striker performance, and was promoted to regularly start with the Irish guy. The coach asked me how it was that I always scored a goal no matter how good our opponents were, because while my Irish partner would score 2 or 3 goals against the lesser opponents and none against the good ones.

The answer was pretty simple. Because he was a much better player than me, he always tried to dribble past two or even three defenders at a time. And while he could reliably do that against the lesser teams, the stronger ones always stopped him by the second or third defender. Since I could only beat one guy by myself and I required a lot of space to do so, I created fewer chances, but those chances provided pretty much the same sort of scoring opportunities whether the defense was strong or weak.

But we both expected to be successful every single time. He never hesitated to take on multiple defenders. I never hesitated to try running past anyone. It didn’t always work for either of us, of course, but because we anticipated success, we generated our own luck.

One thing you’ll notice about sports is the way the best players always anticipate things. Quarterbacks talk about “throwing a receiver open”. That means they throw to where the receiver will be, even though he is covered at the moment they see him, in the expectation that he will break free of the coverage by the time the ball arrives. The best strikers run to the open space, expecting that their teammates will pass the ball before he is in an offside position.

If you don’t shoot, you will not score.

Two of the most important goals I have scored for my current team required anticipation. With the one that upset the three-time champions, I had to assume that a free kick would clear both the wall and all the heads of the main line of the defense. And the other one, that won the league title for us at the very last second of the game, I had to assume that a defender’s desperate slide was going to miss a long diagonal pass to me. In either case, if I had waited to see what happened before committing to my run, I would have missed the opportunity to reach the ball, shoot, and score.

Before you can experience success, you must first anticipate it. Lady Luck will not smile upon you or give you her hand if you do not demand her favor.

The ancients’ idea that Fortuna personally favors some individuals and disfavors others wasn’t an invention ex nihilo, it was an observation.