And Luck Noticed

About a quarter of a century ago, General Colin Powell said something that has stuck in my mind like Velcro. He said that when people ask him the secret to his success, his answer is: “I worked like a dog—and luck noticed.” 

Now lest you get the wrong impression—lest you think that General Powell just happened by our house for afternoon tea and made that statement while he and I were sitting in our living room discussing current events and the state of the world—let me confess: That wasn’t the context.

Rather, I was but one of several hundred who heard that memorable statement while General Powell was giving a presentation at a Peter Lowe Success Seminar at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. But that doesn’t in any way diminish the significance of what he said. It just provides perspective in how I happened to hear it.

Lucky Breaks

The significance of the statement is that General Powell was astute enough to recognize that a lot of people work like a dog to make their mark in life. In fact, there may be a lot of people who worked even harder than he did. But the difference between super-high achievers and the hard workers who experience less success isn’t that the winners were necessarily smarter than all the others, but that the winners may have had one or more lucky breaks. 

Maybe the winners just happened to be in the right place at the right time, which allowed them to meet the right person who just happened to occupy the right position to help open a door for a young person who clearly had great potential. But the prime difference between the winners and the also-rans often may be just one lucky break, or a series of lucky breaks. 

General Powell was humble enough to publicly acknowledge that fact—because he knew he wasn’t a totally self-made man who had achieved success all by himself. Luck, the contribution of others, and who knows what else had played a role.

Solomon’s Take on It

King Solomon made a similar observation in Ecclesiastes 9:11: “The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.”

If I had been Solomon’s editor, I would have added a qualifier about each category: The race is not [always] to the swift or the battle [always] to the strong, nor does food [always] come to the wise or wealth [always] to the brilliant or favor [always] to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

And why the qualifiers? Because skill, intelligence, preparation, working like a dog and many other factors enhance the likelihood of success. They’re crucial. But they don’t remove the randomness in life that can change expected outcomes. Solomon called it chance. General Powell called it luck. But the impact is the same.

Tipping the Scales

General Powell’s statement helps remind us that we don’t make it to the top because we’re absolutely, categorically, inarguably the best-equipped for the job. All kinds of random factors—seen and unseen, recognized and unrecognized—may have tipped the scales in our favor. 

On the other hand, if we aren’t the ones who make it to the top, it doesn’t mean that we’re failures. In fact, it doesn’t even mean that we weren’t the best-qualified. It may merely mean that an array of random factors gave some other person a distinct advantage. 

In other words, it may just mean that, in our case, luck DIDN’T notice.