I believe we make our own luck. Of course, there is a bit of good and bad luck involved in every success and failure we have, but luck does not drive the process for success.

It really annoys me when I hear a quip about a successful person who “just got lucky”.

To execute on a process for success we need to go to bat as often as we can. We might get a hit; we might even get a home run. But, chances are, we’ll strike out. So, getting that home run is not luck alone; it’s an inevitable outcome of practice, hard work, and simply stepping up to bat again, and again, and again.

I really appreciate Annie Duke’s book Thinking in Bets. She uses her professional poker career to walk us through how we should be thinking about the role of luck in our lives and how to design processes which acknowledge the reality of chance and probability.

Too often we attribute positive outcomes to good luck. The fact is that a good outcome most likely came from an effective process of frequent failures, adjustment, persistence, and hard work.

One way to make this concrete is to look at the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop, which has its roots in the military as a decision making model to guide combat operations. A battle commander will collect observations. She’ll then use those observations to check her assumptions, evaluate tactics, adjust processes, and course correct if needed. She makes a decision to drive her next action, and then executes, starting the process over again.

The more quickly a battle commander can iterate through this OODA loop the more likely it is that the command will gain an advantage over an opponent. A successful commander is not waiting for good fortune to arrive.

The interesting thing is that it can be difficult even for successful people to articulate their relationship with luck and the role it played in their success. How much of their success could be attributed to luck? Well, the answer is probably all of it, yet none of it.

You can find a remarkable archive of this phenomenon at Guy Raz’ How I Built This podcast where he interviews successful entrepreneurs. At the end of each episode he asks how much of their success could be attributed to luck. These successful people often end up going through a strange series of mental gymnastics as they struggle with the question. While they know luck played a role, they also know they relentlessly pursued different routes up the mountain until they found one that worked.

Paul Graham put it this way in his essay How to Do Great Work

You need to take action. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.

I also love the marketing slogan Nike used for Caitlin Clark during her record basketball season at Iowa:

This was never a long shot.

We need to put ourselves in that position. Where good luck becomes inevitable.

Put in the reps. Fail, get up, reflect, adjust, and try again. Do this again and again until you get what you want. Be relentless.