Seth Godin on his blog has marvelously explained the inherent characteristic of “effort” while comparing luck and effort:
While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.
He has talked about people who have lots of luck; success falls on to their laps without much effort. On the other hand there are people who have to sweat and bleed for little fragments of success and recognition.
At the cost of sounding like “the grapes are sour” I would like to say that the perception of success and failure differs from person to person and so is the perception of luck. Some people consider failure is a great opportunity to learn and start all over again. Similarly I consider myself extremely lucky that I don’t have to leave home every morning in order to make a living. I just have to move into another room to manage my online copywriting and content writing business. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have to work hard; but I am lucky that the technology of today has helped me earn a comfortable living while being with my wife and my baby all the time. Seth Godin has rightly pointed out that we are lucky that we were not born in the times of black plague or when slavery was rampant and freedom was hard to find.
Does this mean I don’t need anything else in my life? Sure I do. I want to earn more money, I want to make my family’s future financially secure, and I want to pursue my genuine passions: singing and writing literature. All these things may happen luckily (a hotshot music director stumbling upon my YouTube video or a big publisher falling in love with my writing style), or I may have to work really hard to achieve them. I have problem with neither.