Here is an example of my risk profile, showing which risks I quickly take, and which ones I avoid: Tina’s Risk-o-meter And, they quickly realize that they all have different risk profiles. They all know right away which types of risks they are willing to take. I ask my students to map their own risk-profile using this “Risk-o-Meter,” that my colleagues and I developed for our creativity class in Stanford University’s Department of Management Science & Engineering. There are physical risks, social risks, emotional risks, financial risks, political risks and intellectual risks, to name a few. Most people think of risk-taking as binary – either you are a risk-taker or you aren’t. Taking some risks, by getting out of your comfort zone, is one way to create a sail to catch the winds of luck. How do you build a sail to catch the winds of luck? But, over time, you will find that other people have all the luck, moving toward their goals much more quickly. If you don’t build a sail to catch them, nobody will tell you that you missed out, and you probably won’t even notice. The trick is that the winds of luck are usually invisible.
The key is understanding that luck is rarely a lightning strike – isolated and dramatic – but a wind that blows constantly. And, when the wind picks up, you are ready to soar! If the wind is negligible, it will slowly guide you toward your objectives, requiring you to be patient. Therefore, you need to build a sail – made up of tiny behaviors – to catch them. Sometimes the “winds of luck” blow lightly, sometimes in gusts and sometimes in directions that you didn’t expect. If you look closely though, you will see lots of ways to increase your luck. The confusion between fortune, chance, and luck speaks to the fact that most people aren’t fully aware of how much control they have over their own fate. You had to do the work to build the required skills, to apply for the position and to perform well in the interview.
There was lots of personal agency involved, even though there were forces beyond your control. For example, you’re lucky when you are offered a great job. Luck is “made” by identifying and developing opportunities. You need to take a chance, such as rolling dice, buying a lottery ticket or asking someone out on a date in order to benefit from a chance event that has some probability of occurring. It is good fortune to be born into a kind family in a comfortable community, and bad fortune to get hit by a car while crossing the street.Ĭhance requires an action on your part.
There is actually a big difference between these concepts.įortune is something that happens to you. We are unintentionally conflating the words luck, chance and fortune. And, we give others and ourselves a break by blaming poor performance on bad luck. We frequently use the word “luck” in ways that obscure it’s true meaning, deploying it as an excuse to modestly mask the skills we’ve mobilized. They believe that they are responsible for creating situations that give rise to lucky breaks. On the surface they look incredibly lucky, but they are really masters of making their own luck.
Entrepreneurs manifest new ventures seemingly out of thin air.
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