I Think Luck is the Sense of Recognizing…Daily Meditation 2.1.24

Today’s Quotation:

I think luck is the sense of recognizing an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. Everyone has bad breaks, but everyone also has opportunities. People who can smile at their breaks and grab their chances get on.-Samuel Goldwyn

Today’s Meditation:

I don’t believe in luck.  Those people who have succeeded in life usually have done so as the result of hard work, being able to see opportunities when they’ve come up, or a combination of the two.  Those people who win tons of money in lotteries or inherit vast fortunes aren’t necessarily lucky–many people who have come into money that way have become quite miserable, very unhappy with their “new” lives.

My biggest problems in life have come when I haven’t recognized opportunities.  Because I haven’t seen them until too late so often, I haven’t been able to take advantage of them.  I suppose many people would say I’ve had bad luck, but I don’t see it that way.  I see it as having missed opportunities, and I don’t get down on myself for having missed them.  After all, when I was growing up, there was no one around to teach me to recognize and take advantage of opportunities.

Most of us are in that same boat–we haven’t been taught how to recognize the opportunities that come our way as opportunities, so we squander chance after chance to make more of ourselves or improve our lives or lifestyles.  That’s okay because that’s how life is. What’s not okay is recognizing the problem and not doing anything about it.

Now that I know how many opportunities I’ve let go of, I must teach myself how to recognize them and take advantage of them.  And the burden isn’t completely on me–plenty of books and tape programs can help us learn to do these things.  This material should be taught in schools, but it isn’t, so we have to find other teachers outside of the classroom who have focused on this sort of thing as their area of expertise.

Bad luck?  Sorry, but there’s no such thing.  The universe functions too well for that to be true.  Sometimes, it’s true that things are completely out of our control, but even if something negative happens to us, there will be something important for us to learn from it.  If we can smile at our bad breaks and move on with our lives, learning in the process, life becomes much brighter.  Bad luck tends to be an excuse for not wanting to look deeper.

Questions to ponder:

1.  Where in our education system can we learn things like recognizing opportunities and taking advantage of them?  Why is it so rare that this is taught?

2.  Who have been your role models?  Are they people who take advantage of opportunities?  What have you learned from them?

3.  What does it take to smile at our bad breaks?  Can you do so?

For further thought:

People do with opportunities as children do at the seashore; they fill their little hands with sand, and then let the grains fall through, one by one, till all are gone.-T. Jones

If you missed our last Daily Meditation, it is here.