I have a very specific group of friends – 10 boys – that I have kept in touch with for almost 20 years now. They were a big, opinionated, energetic bunch of teenagers then – and they are a big, opinionated, energetic bunch of men, now.
We have shared good times and hard times and sad times. They even took me to dinner the night after my dog died. That’s friendship.
On that night – that really, really hard night – one of them asked how I was liking my house. I happened to mention to him that I was having trouble with the retaining wall in my yard. It wasn’t holding. I was uneasy about what to do. He said “I bet we could come up with a solution.”
I’m sure I said something like, “Oh, that’s so nice, Jake. I’m sure I can figure it out,” and I probably changed the subject.
But a couple months later, Jake and I were having lunch. He was going through something hard and I tried to listen. At the end of that lunch he said, “Did you ever figure out that issue with your wall?”
Seth Simonds says that what sometimes looks like luck is really having the right information in the right place at the right time.
How can we more often be one of those ‘lucky’ people?
He suggests 3 elements.
1 – Proximity.
“The people you think of as lucky often put a lot of effort into being near as many pertinent opportunities as possible. You can put yourself in the right place at the right time more often by identifying an area in which you have the necessary skills and knowledge to capitalize on sudden opportunities.”
2 – Practice
“In every case, the practice that precedes the instance of ‘luck’ is just as important as the crowning moment itself.”
3 – Persistence
“Being in the right place at the right time involves being in a lot of places at a lot of times that might seem inconvenient or even painful. You’ve heard that luck favors the well-prepared but what about luck favoring the tenacious? Every successful (you might say ‘lucky’) person I know has come very close to giving up many times…But they never stopped trying.”
By the end of my lunch with Jake, he had told me of a place he knew where we could get boulders to bolster my wall, he had made an appointment to meet me there to pick out the rocks I wanted, he had promised to round up a group of those men I mentioned earlier, and he had set aside a Saturday to come to my yard with them and do the work on the wall..
I was overwhelmed with gratitude.
Jake was in the right place at the right time with the right information for me. For ME.
How can we make ourselves more likely to be the ‘Jake’ in someone’s story, or even our own?
Mr. Simonds suggests asking ourselves 3 sets of questions:
- What are you doing to make timing right for you? What area have you put yourself in a position to “get lucky” in? Is there a skill you can improve or knowledge you can gain that will allow you to better capitalize on opportunities you discover?
- Have you given up on practice only to wonder why you’re not improving in your field and experiencing the same luck as others? What steps can you take today in order to hone your senses and polish your skills so the next opportunity can be turned into a lucky moment?
- Do you have a tendency to give up on things too early? Think of the last project you gave up on. What might have happened had you stuck with it? Are you currently giving your everything to the project or relationship at hand?
Everyone I know considers Jake “lucky.” But Jake could write a book about being in the right place at the right time with the right information – and he probably should. He is a master at it.
I can’t wait to hear about how you’re creating the same kind of ‘luck’ in your story. And if you need help, maybe it’s the right time for me to be your coach. I’d love to hear from you.
