There is a saying that it is better to be lucky than good.  If anything, it is the other way around, at least in the long term.  It is better to be good than lucky.

It amazes me to see how so many people in this world don’t realize that it is usually the good who get lucky.  It doesn’t matter if you are talking about sports, relationships, health, business, investing, overall success, or a number of other things.  When you do something and become good at it, luck tends to follow.

This isn’t to say that the good can’t get unlucky.  Accidents can happen.  Someone playing a sport can experience an injury.  Someone eating healthy can still get sick.  A successful entrepreneur can lose his business.

What is important though is that doing things right puts you in a position to get lucky.  Whereas someone doing things wrong will almost never get lucky.  And if they do get lucky, the luck won’t continue.

I was watching a tennis match the other day.  Someone hit a ball that touched the net but went over.  After winning the point, the person put his hand up while looking at his opponent as if to say, “Sorry about that.”  It has become common etiquette in tennis as if to acknowledge that you got lucky and it was unfortunate for your opponent.  When I thought about it though, even in this circumstance, it is only partial luck.  After all, to hit a good hard shot in tennis, you generally want to get the ball as close to the net as possible without having your ball stopped by the net.  So if you just barely skim the net, this could actually be considered a pretty good shot.  The game of tennis has a history of proper etiquette and I am not criticizing the kind gesture, but it was just another example of where you have to be good to get lucky.

I play a little amateur chess, so I understand the game of chess well enough to know that it is generally the good people who get lucky.  I have seen plenty of examples where one player blunders and the opponent doesn’t even recognize the blunder.  It has happened to me plenty of times.

I was surprised one time during a U.S. chess championship where Fabiano Caruana (who will compete for the world title in November 2018) was playing a game and went into what is called a confessional booth.  You can talk to the viewing public about your current match, but the other players can’t hear what you are saying.  Caruana briefly explained his position and said he thought he had a winning position as long as he hadn’t overlooked anything.  After his opponent eventually lost and was interviewed, he basically chalked up that portion of the game to luck.  The problem is that Caruana had explained that exact position to the camera at the time and why it was winning, even though his opponent thought it was a few lucky moves after that.

This is actually stunning to hear a grandmaster try to cite luck in a game when his opponent just clearly was better than him.  (I don’t know who it was, as I didn’t recognize the name at the time.)

If you think hard enough, you can come up with hundreds of examples in life where somebody gets lucky because they put themself in the right position to accept that luck.

Maybe you always need a little bit of luck to get through things and be successful.  But you have to lay the groundwork in order for that luck to even be possible.  If an entrepreneur sells 10 different kinds of products and one of them happens to take off and make him rich (while his other 9 products failed), are you going to say he got lucky?  Maybe he got lucky with that one, but he had to be in the game in the first place.  Most people will never be in the game in the first place.

If you are finding yourself saying “I just can’t catch a break” or “that guy just got lucky”, then you may need to reexamine your life and strategies.  It is possible that you have just had some bad breaks recently, but know that if you want luck to come your way, you have to make sure that you are doing things well to put yourself in the position to receive that luck.

I have written a similar post on this subject before, but I think it is important enough to emphasize that I wanted to write more on it.