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The 'something more' might just be luck. Imagining that there's some Nietzschean superhero quality you can cultivate in order to succeed where many people just like you have failed is a kind of magical thinking.

When you drive to work and hit all green lights, do you search deep within yourself for the elusive quality that set you apart from the red-light-stopping masses?




My response to that, and I got this from some movie I can't remember, is that I prefer to think I create my own luck. Let's hypothesize that opportune situations arise for all people at various times. All things being equal, only a select few people, like Bill Gates, or Mark Cuban, become significantly wealthy. I feel this may appear to many to be luck on the surface, but that there was actually a lot of unseen maneuvering and positioning (i.e. hard work) going on behind the scenes possibly for years which allows such individuals to capitalize on their lucky opportunity when it presents itself.


From Baz Luhrman, Sunscreen:

"What ever you do, dont congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either - your choices are half chance, so are everybody elses."


Though Baz Luhrmann set that to music, Mary Schmich originally wrote it.


Yes, I know. But it's a lot harder to find the rest of the text and I didn't want to link to some sleazy lyrics site here.

Quite an amazing text. For a long time it was attributed to Kurt Vonnegut as well I believe.


The misattribution, forwarding, and repurposing is a great story. The Wikipedia article includes a link to the original Chicago Tribune column:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen


Two-Face said that in the Dark Knight referencing his coin with a "Heads" on both sides.




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