Luck is not chance—

It’s Toil—

Fortune’s expensive smile Is earned—

The Father of the Mine Is that old-fashioned Coin

We spurned—.

Many might argue there is no such thing as luck, it all depends on hard-work. And I wouldn’t say I completely disagree, hard-work does get you to places and opens so many gateways for you. For a degree, you need to crack the entrance in order to get admission, and then work hard throughout the tenure to get good grades.

Now, good luck may help you in the entrance as it is mostly objectives, and you may make wild guesses which may turn out to be the right answers. But then, the rest of the degree will definitely not go well based on merely good luck. Hard-work, if not smart-work and consistency are the key elements needed for good grades. The same applies for a job and even a business. The main ingredient to success is and has always been hard-work, good luck can just be a catalyst. As the saying goes – “Fortune favours the brave”.

Good luck might get you something, but to hold on to it, you need to work on it. You can meet a person by chance and fall in love with them, but to make the relationship work, you will need to put in efforts. Chance is not going to make the person stay with you if you put zero effort into it. Similarly bad luck might put you in a situation where you feel like you are failing, there you need to put in extra hard-work and you’re all set. We shouldn’t solely depend on luck to have things in our favour but work hard for what we desire. A person might get very unlucky to not have their dream job after working very hard, but that doesn’t mean other opportunities are lost. However, good luck is something we’d all love to have. Everyone would like a good hair day, and just a good whole day everyday. Unfortunately, luck doesn’t favour everyone at all times. It’s a temporary and completely random occurrence, if you are lucky today in a certain event, it gives you no assurance that you will be lucky in the very same event. Whether you believe it is just thinks randomly working out for you, or because you hold certain superstitions, good luck does exist. Without going too deep into the mathematics behind it, winning a lottery is purely based on chance.

The number of times you invest in the lottery has no role in it, and hence, no role of hard-work. Then we’ve got games based on probability, which often end up in people gambling huge sums of money. They might have got a trick or two, which they claim to use, but in the end, the dice rolls off to a certain number randomly, and so are cards allotted randomly to every participant.

People can get extremely wealthy off gambling, or can go bankrupt within seconds. Different religions have different points of view regarding good luck and the superstitions associated with it. While some set up certain superstitions or ordain you to do certain actions in order to attract good luck and repel bad luck, others completely shun such practices. However, even for an atheist, good luck does exist, and in the end affects him just as those who believe in a religion. Good luck does not differentiate between people on any basis, it is neither racist nor sexist. In the cards and at the bend in the road. W. S. Merwin has beautifully and perfectly summed up what luck is, and how it comes and goes without an invitation or a warning:

We never saw you in the womb and in the crossfire in the numbers whatever you had your hand in which was everything we were told never to put our faith in you to bow to you humbly after all because in the end there was nothing else we could do but not to believe in you. Still we might coax you with pebbles kept warm in the hand or coins or the relics of vanished animals observances rituals not binding upon you who make no promises we might do such things only not to neglect you and risk your disfavour oh you who are never the same who are secret as the day when it comes you whom we explain as often as we can without understanding.
Authored by : Yousma Salati

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