Luck Has Nothing To Do With My Big Breaks. I Made Them Happen

You know what really annoys me? When people say "you're so lucky."

Luck has nothing to do with the way I choose to live my life.

For example, I enjoy travelling, so I make sure to factor that into my life as often as I can. I make a lot of sacrifices behind the scenes to make it happen.

No one is funding these trips, nor did I fall into a pile of money. I just choose not to spend money on things but rather on experiences.

(I'm not alone. A study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology shows people who made expensive purchases on products rather than experiential investments often devalued a new item's worth directly after buying it, according to the Huffington Post.)

No one is doing the research of where I'm going to live (when I do month long trips), no one tells me which areas to avoid because they're unsafe, what the customs are and the social etiquette is, or the best way to get from point a to b, and no one is scouring websites on my behalf to find the best travel deals.

Luck didn't allow me to live in a tropical rainforest in Bali, where I felt like I walked through a postcard every day on my way to the coworking space I worked out of, which resembled a bamboo treehouse overlooking pristine rice fields.

Luck didn't allow me to live comfortably in Shanghai, learn Mandarin and travel to 12 countries in two and half years. I made that happen.

Whenever I've gotten a break in life, it's because I put myself out there and seized an opportunity.

On social media, we tend to show how extraordinary our lives are. I don't advertise the fact that I got kicked out of my first job in Shanghai for being a brown girl, or how stressful it was travelling for 31 hours to arrive in Ubud Bali in the dead of night, only to sleep in a guesthouse lined with biggest creepy crawlers I didn't know existed in life. On top of that, I was hangry as f*ck, with no food options because it was past midnight. Looking back, it's all part of the experience, plus it made me become even more fearless. The point is I didn't get unlucky in this case, these were things that were out of my control.

I do believe that some people experience random luck, such as those that win Roll Up The Rim at Tim Hortons or those that happen to find a 50-dollar bill on the street, when everyone else walked passed it without noticing it. But people who win the lottery, I don't consider that luck since someone has to win at some point.

I recently read the book Hustle that talks about taking risks, looking for hidden opportunities and to stop being a dreamer but rather a doer -- these are things that put you in a better position to get lucky.

Whenever I've gotten a break in life, it's because I put myself out there and seized an opportunity, without weighing the cons first.

Travelling is only one of many examples. I would like to think I'm a people person and have some pretty amazing people around me, not because I'm lucky but because I have cultivated these relationships over decades. Some of these people have also become indispensable to my network connections.

Ninety-nine percent of people make their own luck. How?

By taking risks

By perfecting their craft

By doing things, not talking about doing things

By making sense of ambiguous opportunities that may come from simply having a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop.

There are so many small actions that can change our path in life. We either write the plot to our own story (a.k.a. create luck) or someone else will write it for us (unlucky). Regardless, we have control over our choices, actions and reactions, and the things we can't control, we need to let them go. That's what self-made lucky people do -- dust off their shoulders and move on.

"People are opportunities. People are jobs. People are companies. People are your life. Not technology, not art, not commerce. Everything begins and ends with your relationships."
-- Neil Patel, Patrick Vlaskovits & Jonas Koffler, authors of Hustle

Next time someone says to you "you're so lucky," replace the word love with luck and belt out Tina Turner's '84 classic "What's Love Got to Do with It."

You'll either discover you have a hidden talent, or you don't.

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Successful People Who Made Their Own Luck

David Brooks(01 of07)

New York Times columnist David Brooks got an unlikely start to his career as a writer, author and political commentator. He began writing a humor column for the school paper in his junior year at the University of Chicago. During his senior year, when he learned that author William F. Buckley was visiting the campus, Brooks sent the author a parody of his memoir, Overdrive, New York magazine reports. Brooks added a note that read: “Some would say I’m envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?”Buckley announced during his lecture in Chicago the next week, "David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to give you a job." Unfortunately, Brooks wasn't there -- he had been selected to participate in a debate tournament in California that day -- but he quickly launched a successful career in journalism after college nonetheless. (credit:Getty)

Sally Field(02 of07)

Sally Field may be an Oscar-winning actress, but she still had to fight to land a role she knew was meant for her, playing Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's wife, in the 2012 film, "Lincoln." The actress fought hard to convince director Steven Spielberg (who originally said he knew she was "not right") and leading man Daniel Day-Lewis that she was the one for the part. Following an initial screen test -- after which Spielberg refused her for the role -- Field convinced Day-Lewis to fly to Los Angeles from Ireland for the day to improv with her in full costume for Spielberg. She nailed it -- and the rest is history."To actually become Mary, I had to demand that they didn't walk away," Field told Good Morning America. (credit:Getty)

Anderson Cooper(03 of07)

Anderson Cooper began his media career as a fact-checker for Channel One, which produces news shows to be broadcast in schools. But the ambitious Cooper -- who had just received his degree in political science from Yale -- got bored with the position pretty quickly. Rather than resigning himself to the daily grind, Cooper took his video camera to Southeast Asia, where he filmed scenes of strife in Myanmar and then parts of Africa. The stunt quickly earned him the position of chief international correspondent for Channel One, and ultimately caught the attention of ABC News, where he landed his first job as an anchor. (credit:AP)

Michael Lewis(04 of07)

Best-selling author and business journalist Michael Lewis has made a career out of uncovering the dark secrets of Wall Street. But he wasn't always getting bylines on cover stories for Vanity Fair and The New York Times -- Lewis was still in the London banking world when he started writing articles satirizing it. His first piece for The New Republic ("It was basically just making fun of British bankers," Lewis said) was a PR nightmare for his firm Salomon Brothers. But it didn't stop him: Lewis continued writing articles using his mother's name, Diana Bleeker, as a pseudonym. Soon enough, "Diana Bleeker" got a contract with Business Magazine -- meaning Lewis could leave his job to pursue his passion."It became clear I could make a living -- if not as fancy a living -- as a writer," Lewis told Publishers Weekly, "and so I quit." (credit:Getty)

Amy Tan(05 of07)

Before Amy Tan was a bestselling author, she ran a technical-writing business with a partner, focusing largely on account management. Feeling stifled and unfulfilled in her position, Tan shared with her partner that she wanted to do more writing, Reader's Digest reported. But he told her to keep doing what she was "most good at" -- chasing down contractors and collecting bills, her least favorite part of the job -- and that writing was her weakest skill. She fought back repeatedly, and when her partner refused to acknowledge her skill, Tan ultimately quit. She took on a heavy load of freelance assignments, and went on to write a handful of best-selling novels. (credit:Getty Images)

Debbie Wasserman Schultz(06 of07)

As a recent college graduate, aspiring politician Debbie Wasserman Schultz helped Florida congressman Peter Deutsch successfully run for the U.S. House of Representatives -- and then got his blessing to go after his seat in the Florida House of Representatives. Wasserman Schultz went from neighborhood to neighborhood, personally knocking on the doors of more than 25,000 people in her home state of Florida to win the seat. She became the youngest female legislator in the state's history at just 26 years old, Business Insider reports. (credit:AP)

Chris Putnam(07 of07)

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg lives by the maxim "Fortune favors the bold" -- and perhaps none of his employees at Facebook personify that idea more than Chris Putnam. In 2005, the young tech whiz hacked the site and wrote a computer virus to make user profiles look like MySpace pages. The hack lasted less than a day, but it caught the attention of COO Dustin Moskovitz, with whom Putnam developed a relationship via Facebook message and AIM. Soon afterwards, Putnam received an offer from Facebook, dropped out of college in Georgia, and moved to Silicon Valley to join the team.With Facebook's founding ethos of risk-taking, it's not surprising that the company decided to hire Putnam. As Zuckerberg once said, "The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks." (credit:PA)

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Luck Has Nothing To Do With My Big Breaks. I Made Them Happen

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