Luck is when you’ve done everything right and you actually receive what you’ve been working towards. Luck is when you’ve done everything right and you don’t get what you’ve been working towards. Luck is when something you haven’t sought winds up in your lap. Luck is when you sit still and nothing happens. It’s not getting what you want because you think you’re deserving of it. That’s just ego and luck.

A race car driver can be the best guy on the track and have the best car but he’s only likely to win if his luck holds out. That means he doesn’t get tangled up with guys he’s lapping and winds up being the third car in a two car accident. That’s luck, in this case bad luck. That means his clutch or any of the 10,000 other components that make up his car, 10,000 man-made therefore imperfect parts, don’t pick that day to fail. Again, that would be bad luck but not divine intervention. Your kid, wife, husband, drowns and the paramedics spend a 1/2 hour to resuscitate them and they sputter back to life. Thank the paramedics profusely and be glad you got the right kind of luck.

Face it, some stuff you just can’t predict or control – control is a deceptive illusion. What you have is the randomness of the universe to tangle with but we try to find patterns in the noise. We do that because we’re hunters and gatherers by birth. We are successful as a species because we can read signs and trails and infer at the end is either dinner or danger. If we couldn’t we wouldn’t have survived this long without the alternative of having our food walk up and sit on our plates… we’re always practicing pattern recognition. And frequently seeing things that aren’t there. The brain is a funny thing.

There is no pattern in a random universe, just luck.

Credit yourself and others for their hard work and keep moving down the trail that doesn’t exist.