How much is luck and how much is skill?
Growing up, my Grandmother put a lot of emphasis on luck. To Gran, luck was something amazing that some lucky people had and others didn’t have. Those who had it were blessed. Those who didn’t have it…well, it’s probably best not to talk about them…
The point is, listening to Gran go on about luck made me believe that luck was all there was to it. Until I was about ten, when I discovered that actually, someone could possess plenty of skill and not much luck.
Take James Michael, for example. We didn’t trust him for two reasons. 1) He had a Surname which was really a first name and 2) He could juggle. Juggling to us was a bit strange and a little bit mystical. This combination, along with the fact that James Michael had ginger hair, made us kids steer well clear of him!
All you can do, really, is do your best and hope that things work out for you. If you have a good bit of skill then that’s no bad thing either
This was totally and completely unfair, of course. In reality James Michael was just a lad with redder than average hair who also could juggle really well (which would later lead him to have some surprising success with a certain number of red-hair-loving-ladies). The point was that James was really very unlucky, yet he possessed this amazing skill that no other boy in school had. So that was when I started to think that maybe luck and skill were totally different entities.
Gran didn’t help much, of course. She still believed in her luck and wouldn’t have it any other way.
All this pondering about skill and luck made things confusing growing up. Even now it makes me wonder how much is skill and how much is luck?
Well, the truth, me thinks, is that the answer is unexplainable. Things happen for reasons unknown to us and it isn’t always easy to tell why one person is successful when another person – no matter how much they try – isn’t.
The lesson here, I think, is that it doesn’t matter if you work with hybrid cars or train monkeys for a living (that’s monkey-training not monkeys who live specifically on trains!): life is full of chance and random possibility and there are still plenty of things we don’t understand about how the world works. All you can do, really, is do your best and hope that things work out for you. If you have a good bit of skill then that’s no bad thing either, as really, skill can only ever increase your chances or being where you want to be.
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