There is No Such Thing as Luck

Tonight I’m flying to France.

When I’m in France I feel like the luckiest person on the planet. Wait. Actually that’s a lie. The truth is that people keep reminding me of how lucky I am. And what I feel is annoyance.

Sometimes I even dream of myself shaking people’s heads until they drop and shouting in their ears until they bleed.

Am I a bad person?

But there’s something you have to know about France. Life in there is hard. It’s definitely harder than in Macau. Thanks to being a fully developed country, we have a government that makes it super hard for people to be entrepreneurs. Or whatever else actually. Everything is way too controlled. Instead of decluttering the system, it’s been made more and more complicated. Taxes are killing everything and everyone.

So people settle for a comfortable and boring 9 to 5 life. Once you’ve got a job and you pay for the car, the fuel, the rent, utilities, and a good meal out once in a while, you end up with not much.

That’s one problem.

Another problem is education. Schools suck. What school teaches you is to get good grades, a degree, how to do what you’ve been told to do, and then get a job that hopefully pays well and be a slave until you’re retired. (Retirement being the time where a lot of people choose to kill themselves because they feel so bored and so depressed and never really thought about what they wanted to do with their lives.)

School doesn’t teach you how to think, how to dig inside yourself to discover what you really want to do and who you really want to be, and how to make that happen.

But this is actually the most important my friend. All the rest is just a bonus, just a consequence of working on what you really believe and becoming who you want to be. Money, fame, enjoyment, fulfilment, happiness. Whatever. All of it.

Once you’ve understood the principle of self-responsibility and have started practicing it, you will never be able to go back. And that’s a good thing.

So, maybe because it’s hard in France, people complain a lot. And because of the situation, it’s hard to move. I get that. The thing is that it is such a common mindset that when other people move, they tend to be the target of heavy jealousy.

So I left.

Because I knew I wanted to do something big with my life. I couldn’t settle. Maybe others can, but it’s not my business. My business is what I do with my life, not what others do with theirs.

So I’ll be in France again tomorrow morning, and I know already how some discussions are going to go. I’ll be so lucky to have traveled for a whole year. I’ll be so lucky to be living in such an exotic place that is Asia. I’ll be so lucky to be married to a Chinese. I’ll be so lucky to able to speak Cantonese. I’ll be so lucky to have a job that pays well. I’ll be so lucky to be able to travel easily and to have seen so many places.

But the thing is that obviously—at least to me—this has nothing to do with luck. Everything has been first a conscious dig within myself, then a decision, and then work to make all of that happen.

Sure, there are things that we don’t control. But they shouldn’t be called luck, or unluck. They should just be called Life.

The difference of vocabulary is important. In one case you take the fact as neutral, you accept it easily and look for a solution. In the other case you taint the fact with some good or bad of your own emotional power and this will always disempower you at the end.

My mother never smoked, rarely drank, was pretty healthy. She still got cancer at 44. Is this called unluck? No. It’s just life. Shit happens. Find a meaning, and deal with it. That’s the only correct thing we can do.

Think “why is this happening to me?” and you end up in a spiral of shit.

Think “what can I do about it? what meaning can I take from this experience?” and you end up stronger, wiser, and more resilient.

From my mom’s story, I took that life is very fragile and that I have to enjoy every single day out of it. So it made me follow my heart, quit my job, and travel for a year. Then finding a way to stay in Asia. Then getting married. Then starting climbing mountains. Then…?

I understood that working in a job that I don’t like to make money for later was BS because maybe there’s no later. I got that you have to enjoy every little moment and make the best out of every experience.

And also, that if I wanted something for my life, I had to go get it.

So it’s always at the same time annoying and sad when I have to talk to these people who refuse to understand that it is not about luck or unluck but about taking one’s own destiny into one’s own hands.

But I know there’s no point in trying to make them understand, because this has to come from the inside. And the truth is that most of us already know that. But we’re just too afraid to make the leap. It’s understandable.

And at the same time we cannot settle for less than we can be without heavy consequences on the quality of our lives.

Who isn’t afraid anyway? The issue at the end is that people are fooling only themselves. They feel unhappy and pretend not to know why, and buy some stuff to fill the hole inside themselves that can never be filled from the outside anyway.

You have to heal from the inside. You’re wounded, but you’re the only healer available. And the only one with the power to succeed.

Luck or the lack of it are just used as excuses to avoid taking responsibility. There’s no luck in the world. Even the one who won the lottery bought a ticket. And there’s no misfortune, just facts that are a part of life.

So when in 10 years I’ll be living between France, Macao and the rest of the world, when I’ll keep climbing the most beautiful mountains around the world, when I’ll be meeting tons of cool people that share the same values that I do, when I’ll be sustaining myself by contributing to society and helping people dealing with their emotions and teaching them how to get the best of life, and someone will tell me how lucky I am I will say: “No, there’s no such thing as luck.”

And I will send them the link to this article.

But for now, boarding time.