Luck doesn?t explain success

?I would wish you luck, but I believe luck is a concept invented by the weak to explain their failures.? ?Ron Swanson, ?Parks & Recreation?

According to C. Hope Clark, a novelist and blogger from South Carolina, ?If something isn?t working for you, it isn?t friggin? luck. It?s you needing to do more.?

She is excellent at writing editorials in her newsletters that leave me feeling much less productive than I know I should be. By the end, this is a good thing, a motivating thing.

One of her features, titled ?Luck,? felt like a written gift just for me, I have to say, because I?ve been in a slump and getting pretty tired of feeling sorry for myself. Opening that newsletter was the kick I needed.

A mentor of mine once said continually doubting yourself is like a kick in the gut to God. Failing?or not?has nothing to do with it. It?s just a form of narcissism. But everyone has days they set up camp between narcissism and incompetence. (Don?t they?)

We all do it. Find ourselves in moments when we feel so low, when we?re sure that no matter what step we take it?ll be the wrong one. No matter what decision we make, it will backfire. So we do nothing. And wait for something. Luck?

It reminds me of the talk around the blue-green algae problem our state reservoirs have had for several years. If there is no rain and the water is stagnant, the algae can grow. But if enough rain does fall and there is movement of some kind in the water, it doesn?t have the conditions that encourage it to build up.

Stagnant = bad.

Movement = good.

In ?Luck,? Clark referenced J.K. Rowling, author of the super-selling Harry Potter book series. An aspiring writer told Clark he wished he had Rowling?s luck in his writing career.

But wouldn?t that translate into having the ?good luck? of being a single mother on welfare, suffering from depression, struggling to keep her and her daughter?s heads above water and then having the result of her blood, sweat and tears rejected 12 times?

Except that one time it wasn?t rejected and she landed a contract that made her one of the best-selling authors of all time. It took her a lot of years of work to get lucky, and then she wrote for 17 years to finish the series. It only appears easy from the outside looking in, after the fact.

Yep, she sure lucked her way right into that history book.

I appreciate the results of hard work, even when I don?t immediately see it through. For the times I get tired and wallow in the satisfaction of curling up into a ball, there are people like C. Hope Clark moving her fingers over a keyboard, prodding the slacker portion of my brain into the minimum of a slow crawl.

Luckily.

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