Which is something entirely different from luck.
As Jim Collins pointed out in Great by Choice, Bill
Gates was not the only high school student in the 1970s
with access to computers. And Tiger Woods wasn’t the only
kid whose dad played golf. So why did these men succeed
in extraordinary ways when the same opportunities were
available to others? They embraced their opportunity and
then did something extraordinary with it. “Luck, good and
bad,” Collins wrote, “happens to everyone, whether we like
it or not.” But when we look at those who achieve
extraordinary success, we see people “who recognize luck
and seize it, leaders who grab luck events and make much
more of them.”^21
What makes a person successful, then, is not the luck,
but what he or she does with it. Opportunities come. The
question is what will you do when they arrive? Successful
people are just as “lucky” as the unsuccessful. The
difference is they do something remarkable with their lucky
moment while the rest of the world sits around, waiting for
the next lucky streak to come.
In that sense, we all have opportunities—not necessarily
to become whatever we want, but to become someone, the
person we were meant to be. It’s one thing to chalk up
successes to good fortune, especially when they belong to
someone else, and quite another to recognize that we live in
a world of opportunity and we all can do something with
what we’ve been given. Practice is what tests your resolve,
what forces you to hone your abilities long after the spark