Six Digits

As of today, 116k + views of my Google + page.  Which in the real world, doesn't quite add up to anything. Google + by all measures has proven to be a bust, and Blogs have now been relegated to shelf space somewhere above a News Forum, but far beneath a 6-second Vine.

I am OK with this development given how this has always served for me, an avenue that resembles more like a Journal entry than a public space for mass consumption.  Might I have been more prolific and written more entries that documented my life these past few years? Sure, but writing for the sake of writing hasn't been as compelling as it used to be.

Nevertheless, here we are, close to a year since my last post... which serves more as a reminder of the seemingly meteoric speed of time passing than anything else.

What's on my mind?

A vacation.

A couple of friends commented on how lucky I was to be able to travel. Strangely, I felt it necessary to correct them. "Luck? It's not luck. I worked hard, saved money, and am traveling. "Still, you're lucky to get to travel." "Why? I purposely picked a career that allows me to take time off..."

They weren't convinced.

So what is luck?

To answer this question, I went to Google. Which naturally led me to Wikipedia where I found this:

"The definition of luck (or chance) varies by philosophical, religious, mystical, or emotional context of the one interpreting it; according to the classic Noah Webster's dictionary, luck is "a purposeless, unpredictable and uncontrollable force that shapes events favorably or unfavorably for an individual, group or cause".^[1] Yet the author Max Gunther defines it as "events that influence one's life and are seemingly beyond one's control.""

Accordingly, or rather, denotatively, I am correct in my initial reaction. A vacation is not a product of uncontrollable forces... but that of appropriate planning.

Which now has me thinking... what are we really saying when we comment on someone else's seemingly stroke of luck?

You get to do something that I don't get to do. Something is happening to you that doesn't happen to me. 

In a sense, calling someone lucky is to remove their agency. That what happened was not of their doing. Which brings us back to the original question... so what IS luck?

Luck is happening upon a dollar bill. Unless you put yourself at a certain location where you know people lose their change. 

Luck is turning your head and spotting a friendly face in an unexpected place.  Unless you've secretly been stalking someone and you HOPE they turned up at this location. 

... then I remembered reading in different places where people described luck as "preparation meeting opportunity."

And so back to Google I went, and found this.

Leave it to Harvard Business Review to give me a run for my money...