It's Timing. Or Luck. Or Both. Right?

What tending to our gardens reveals about the fallacy of the lucky.

Last week I started to write about timing. What I published, however, was less about timing and more about recognizing and appreciating the moments when the timing was right and we chose an upward path. But I didn't feel like I hit the mark. I didn't feel like I could cross the topic off my list.

The problem is, things are swell. But I'm trying to avoid writing about how swell things are because there's a part of me that feels it's random. Like it has nothing to do with me. Like it's luck.

But for every stroke of good luck or timing, I think there have to be dozens of missed opportunities. Right?

For example, it's hard for me to imagine meeting someone better suited to be my wife than my wife. But the math doesn't bear this out. If the circumstances leading up to our first meeting never happened, there would have to be someone else out there – a bizarro wife, let's say – with whom I would be equally compatible.

Right?

There are distinct moments responsible for the most meaningful crossroads in my life. And nested amongst those are countless other events, decisions, and circumstances directly or indirectly responsible for shepherding me toward those.

The quandary is this: How much credit do I get to claim for this rat's nest of cause & effect?

I suspect our mental model for this may be the most biased thing possible. Everyone having a swell time will likely claim a large chunk of responsibility for their success while people down on their luck will claim the inverse. But perhaps this is too simplistic. My gut tells me many consciencious people who are also highly successful feel comfortable enough admitting timing and luck play a significant part. But timing and luck are random forces.

Right?

Seneca would have us believe otherwise.

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. - Seneca

Ok, fine. Let's make our own luck.

But what does preparation look like? And how do we know when we're peering down the barrel of an opportunity?

Let's start with preparation. Remember the question about how much credit I get to claim? That's a loser's question. Claiming credit is rear-facing and only important to people who don't deserve it. The prepared only care about forward movement.

Preparation is all about conditioning, as in, the conditions of my life set up in such a way that the default outcome is positive. This boils all the way down to my impulses. Impulse recognition and control is such an important skill it should be the foundation of all health curricula in school. Impulses are like self-defeating imps. They binge-eat Oreos until their poo turns black. Then they doom-scroll Instagram reels while they're on the toilet until their right leg falls asleep. So I've been told. Impulses are unfit to arrange the proper conditions for us because they're incapable of looking beyond the moment. They never question their behavior and they never think ahead.

Some might think there are philosophical implications of suppressing every impulse as if doing so might somehow rob a person of spontaneity or personality. But those people, who I obviously just made up to prove a point, are mistaking impulses for instincts. Instincts can be honed over time by consistently attending to the feedback loop resulting from our behavior. Impulses, on the other hand, are ground-floor emotions we can only learn to overrule by applying rationale and principle after the fact. 

Once we get our impulses in check. We need a vision. It doesn't have to be crystal clear, planned out, or even accurate. But it can't be absent. If it's noble, that's even better, but nobility is less important than simply having one at all. We can zero in on aiming for something noble along the way. What kind of vision is this, exactly? Well, let's say I'm a kid in high school and I don't know what I want to be quite yet. What do I like to spend time on? What's the getting-paid-to-do-it version of that? Great. That's my tentative vision. I can course correct as my interests and competencies mature, but the earlier I start, the more practice I will have acting in the best interests of my vision.

Once even a hint of a vision is established, the choices I make can be weighed against it, like a decision tree. "Does this choice help me take a step toward that vision, yes or no?" Maybe I don't know. Maybe it's unclear. Well, let's ask another way. "Does this choice have a strong chance of sending me in the opposite direction, hurting my chances of reaching that vision?" Sometimes that one is easier to answer. Now it's impulse control's time to shine. Because maybe that thing looks fun in the short term. And maybe my friends are all participating. But maybe I'm ignoring an important responsibility by going after it. And if this happens too many times, and if the fun is always obviously bad for me, maybe I need some different friends who also have a noble vision.

Which brings me to the company we keep. In my essay “Getting into Trouble, for Crying Out Loud”, I referenced the conundrum of nature vs. nurture as it pertains to our gravitation to certain peer groups:

...despite the obvious influence our peers have on our behavior, it's our natural attraction to those types of peers that really determines what path we end up taking in life. In other words, if I was born with a preternatural yearning to be perceived as "cool" and I grew up in an era where smoking was considered cool, my peer group wouldn't be the ones influencing me to smoke; rather, when I reached an age where that started to matter, I would naturally gravitate toward a peer group already consisting of smokers.

When it comes to making progress toward our vision, our peers are instrumental in how we perceive success. The habits of the people with whom we spend the most time will inevitably rub off on us, and the industriousness of the group will follow a trajectory to match. In the example from above, those cool kid smokers, while an empirically unhealthy bunch, aren't necessarily "the wrong crowd". If they're shippers¹, they're gonna make it, and because of the unconscious forces driving us to keep up, so will we – we boost each other's successes. If, on the other hand, they do nothing but sit around, trash other people, and complain about the world, we have to get the fuck out of there. They'll do everything they can to drag us away from our vision because all our ambition shines a light on what they lack.

So now we've controlled our impulses for more constructive decision-making, we set ourselves a vision, and we cultivated a group of like-minded peers with a winning mindset to add social support and reinforcement. What's missing? Time.

Specifically, time administration. None of this means anything if we can't give ourselves enough time to breathe. And not the "let's kick our feet up and leave our responsibilities for another day" breathe. I mean "We have 3 hours of work to do so let's free up 5 hours just in case". The astute among us will note the aspirational nature of this since humans are horrendous estimators of duration as it pertains to work. However, while we have neither control nor accurate projections of how long the work will take, we do have complete control over the amount of time we allocate. 3 hours of work might end up being 2 or 10, but the 5 hours we set aside, barring any emergencies or crippling bouts of faffing, won't change unexpectedly. Getting good at finding areas of wasted time to reclaim is a skill that takes practice and conscious, brutal honesty. We often convince ourselves that we deserve to unwind by watching hours of shows and movies, for example. But we don't "deserve" anything, per se. We simply choose to spend those hours that way, and sacrifice every other thing we could be doing during that time. This isn't wrong, necessarily. That is, unless we feel constantly anxious, worried, pressed for time, overworked, overwhelmed, and stressed. Those feelings are a sign that we haven't become masters of our time administration, and perhaps those hours we spend "unwinding" are being misallocated away from padding our terrible estimates. If you know someone who complains all the time about being busy and tired, I guarantee you also know someone who unknowingly spends 2 hours a day mindlessly scrolling social media, 2 hours a day watching shows, and at least 30 minutes a day complaining to their friends about how busy and tired they are.

In fact, as an exercise, let's examine our potential weekday. 24 hours. Subtract 8 for sleep, because that's how much we all want. 16 hours left. Subtract 10 hours for work, on the off-chance we have a commute. Many will be able to subtract less. That leaves 6. Unless we eat every meal at an Italian restaurant, we're probably spending around 2 hours a day cooking & eating. Now we're down to 4...4 hours. Unlike decades ago when people went to the office, worked all day, and then came home, many people today go to the gym, make personal phone calls, leave for appointments, and take care of other personal matters during work hours. Ethics aside, for most people the four hours left over after sleep, work, and nutrition are utterly free. 4 free hours. On an average work day. Add the 10 hours we subtracted for work to a day off and we have 14 hours to spend however we want. And we somehow still have the self-importance to pretend we're "busy".

Anyway, let's refocus. If we presume our impulses, lack of vision, destructive influences, and poor time management are things we could reliably improve – and they are – we can set out to do so consciously and with intent. This is the preparation.

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Opportunity is more straightforward. Opportunity is both a simple answer to a simple question and a byproduct of the preparation itself. The simple question is one we ask ourselves whenever we have a decision to make: will this push me toward my vision? The simple answer is yes or no. As for the byproduct, people who practice preparation are conspicuously more reliable than those who don't. Reliable people are sought out to fill the needs of others, i.e., presented with opportunities to prove their reliability. Hell, by simply making the attempt to be prepared, we're putting ourselves one step clear of the complainers, the self-appointed victims, and the apathetic.

So in the end, good timing and luck are not mystical. And they're not random. They're agricultural. They're a result of attentive gardening. We cultivate the proper conditions to allow the good fortune in our lives to emerge and grow. Given enough time, luck has no choice but to find us.

1. Shippers are scrappy, action-oriented doers. Very useful. Very high do:say ratio. They let their results do the talking.

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