DearNSPFellow: Your Life Is Not A Lottery Ticket

How do you define success? Is it in the amount of money you would accumulate in the next 20 years or it is in the happy marriage you are working towards. Is it in how high you reach in your chosen field or it is in your living standard?

Does accomplishing your aims or purpose in life come from luck or intentional planning with regards to your skills and the consistency of your work. Do you think someone owes you success? Maybe your parents or the leaders of this dear nation owe it to you, that you have all you need without breaking a sweat.

The good thing about success is that it does not discriminate. The other good thing is it does not come served on a golden platter. This is because there is no structured formula for success, success is acquired through trials and errors, where you become a master of something by learning from your mistakes. So the truth is, to be successful, you need to put in the efforts. It is not by luck or chance. We may talk about the God factor, but God is not a magician. And God works with men who are ready to work with Him; to put up some efforts. Even if success is a lottery ticket from God, that lottery will not come down and wake those who are sleeping.

A matter of luck?
If you believe our lives in by chance and luck, why go to school? Spending a great part of your life chasing a degree when you should be sitting in the house for a degree to be awarded to you through chance or luck. Being a service personnel is worthless if you believe your life is a lottery ticket. Why go to work when you can just stay in bed and wait for manner to fall.

Successful people may make you believe that success is by chance or luck. You may have realized that their probability of succeeding at a new thing is high, whether due to their network, net worth, or experience. They have already put in the efforts to build a foundation that guarantees success. And even with that guarantee, they are still required to put in some efforts.

What are successful people saying?
Warren Buffett considers himself a member of the lucky sperm club and a winner of the ovarian lottery. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon jokes that his success if half luck, half good timing and the rest brains. Bill Gate added that he was lucky to be born with certain skills. Really, Mr Gate, born with certain skills?

But let ask ourselves, are all these successful people being truthful about how they became successful? “Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble” Thiel, wrote in his book, Zero to One. “A few like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, have created several multibillion-dollar companies. If success were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist” he added.

Bill Gate and Steve Jobs didn’t just create the innovations that are running the world today by winning the tech lottery. It was through planning and hard work. Their success was not accidental; it was a matter of design. You should know this by now, the quality of life you are living now is a result of either your own sacrifices or your family’s. And if things are hard for you then it means you are not putting in the work or your family didn’t build any fortune for you to enjoy. Either ways there was the need to put in the efforts at some point.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1912 that, “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances…. Strong me believe in cause and effect” after he became the first explorer to reach the South Pole. This sums it all, you don’t become what or who you want to become through luck but efforts.

A matter of design?
You can’t expect a future that is glamourous without planning towards it today. You can’t have a definite future without knowing what it looks like and working to shape it the way you want it to be.

To some of you, the future can be better but you don’t know how that is going to happen so you won’t make any specific plans towards it. You live by the day and allows the wind to take you anywhere it wishes. Some also believe the future can be known but it will be unpleasant and unwelcoming where anything could happen and cause extinction. To others, the future will always be bleak and you have no idea what to do about it. And then there are some of you who believes the future will be better than the present if you plan and work for it.

The question is, which of these quadrants do you belong to? Access yourself and see where you fall. You may not see yourself in any of the mirrors above if you are not digging deep to see if your inactions and actions is making you to believe that life is a slot machine. And everything will fall in place even if you do nothing about it or even if you don’t know what to do about it.

But if you seize the present and work towards a definite future you have designed, you are picking yourself from the slot machine. You have taken the bold step, the hard way to design the life you want.

Bottom Line
This generation has been raised with so much fear that we dismiss definite optimism with great plans and see those who design and plan their future as being cranky and hubris. Then this people will go on and succeed and you will still be patronizing life instead of taking it by the horn and making it what you want it to be.

Therefor the only option is to start believing that you are entitled to effortless progress. That your uncle who is busting his ass somewhere owes you. It’s time we reorient ourselves and start building the future you want today. because, you may be born out of luck or chance or mistake, call it whatever you want, but your life is not a lottery ticket and life is not a slot machine.