This morning at the gas station, I had to go inside to pay. When I got inside, there were three other people in line before me. The cashier asked me if I was there for lottery tickets. When I said no, she said she could wait on me right away. That’s when it dawned on me that all the other people in line were buying lottery tickets.


The first thought that popped into my head was, “Why would anyone want to spend their money on lotto tickets? There are so many better uses for that money.” I could tell that the folks in line were serial lottery players. They probably take a portion of their paycheck every Friday and invest in tickets.
For people like this, they believe that their only way to a better life is through luck. Every Friday, they bet on luck. Or so they think.


Luck is being in the right place at the right time. But how often does this actually happen?


You would have to go back and look at why the person is in that place at that time. An example of sheer luck would be where for some odd reason, I had to go to a different gas station than I normally would. Meanwhile, someone else has decided that they are going to give $500 to the next person who pulls into the gas station. That next person just so happens to be me. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I ended up being in the right place at the right time.


But how much of life is being in the right place at the right time? Surely it plays a role. And if we looked at it, it could be said that being in the right place at the right time probably happens about as often as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s a complete crap-shoot.


If I were to pitch all my faith into luck based on this description, I think I would be a very dull person.


I have learned that forcing opportunities is a losing game, too. Every time I have pushed an opportunity, it has ended in disaster. As a child, the pastor of our church would caution us against praying too hard or too much for something to happen, because eventually we would get it, but it wouldn’t be what we wanted after all. At the time, this made no sense to me, but I think I get what he was saying now. I have solid, concrete examples from my own life of how I’ve made this mistake, and let me say, the price you pay for pushing an elephant through a pinhole because you want it on the other side is absolutely enormous. (This is why the pushing the current healthcare reform has me so cringy. I know what waits on the other side. This president wants so badly to be in the history books for having been the one to reform healthcare, and while that will happen, the paragraphs that describe the consequences of his actions will not be anything he wants to read.)


I think you can very passively increase your odds for opportunity without forcing anything. I think we see examples of this every day. Harrison Ford was a wannabe actor who worked on a construction site for a movie. That’s where he was discovered. Another movie starlet was discovered because her friends convinced her to go out to a party. Little did she know the party was held at an executive’s house, and he was so impressed by her energy and personality that she got a call and was offered a starring role the next day.


You could look at both of these examples and at first say they were lucky. They were in the right place at the right time. But if you look a little closer, you see they were not lucky; they were passive opportunists. Harrison Ford might have been a wee bit more active than the starlet, because he may have specifically chosen that construction site because it was for a movie, and he wanted to be in the movies. But the starlet – that’s the one you could almost, almost say it was luck. The thing that keeps it from being luck is that she chose to go to the party. If for some reason she had no choice but to end up at the executive’s house – say she was driving through the neighborhood when her car broke down – then you could call it luck.


The beauty of being a passive opportunist is that you never know what’s going to happen, but if you do nothing, you guarantee nothing will happen.


They say that 80% of success is showing up. And I think that’s right. But I think the showing up part can be achieved simply by showing up to life. Just show up. You don’t have to be the life of the party. Just make an appearance. Just show up. See what happens. I think you will find that you are an opportunist, and not just lucky.