Good luck is underrated – but it certainly has a nice ring to it
I lose things. A lot. But I am delighted to say that these misplaced items usually find their way back to me. A wallet dropped in the park, a jacket left hanging in a hotel wardrobe, a suitcase forgotten on a train – all have been returned to my possession. I have also been reunited with several laptops left to fend for themselves in the seat-back pockets of aeroplanes. This is such a trait of mine that when my colleague Tom recently made the same error on a flight to Zürich, he rather ungraciously shouted out, “Oh no, I’ve done an Andrew!” I’ve never liked the man.
So while a little panic-inducing, it wasn’t a huge surprise on Sunday evening when I could not find my wedding ring anywhere in the house, just as we were about to head out for dinner. Some people boast of never having removed theirs since the day that it was popped on their finger; I remove mine at night and before I go to the gym. And I don’t like typing with a ring or watch on. This all means that the little band of metal has numerous opportunities to go astray – and it does.
I once dropped it in Geneva Airport – someone kindly handed it in to the lost and found. On another occasion, when I was playing with it in a restaurant and left it on the table, the waiter called an hour later to see if perhaps I was missing an important finger accessory. I have assured the other half that this is not a sign – well, of my forgetfulness, maybe.
As we got home, a few glasses of champagne down (toasting the dog’s departure has seen an uptick in alcohol consumption), the other half reminded me of the search-and-rescue mission that we would need to undertake in the morning and – at that exact moment – I looked down and saw, in the middle of the street, glistening brightly in the lamp light, my ring.
Our road is a popular route for pedestrians. Did 100 people step over the ring without even seeing it? And how did it even fall off my finger and land there?
Luck is a funny concept, hard to explain with reason or statistics but it should not be discounted. And I am not talking about family privilege masquerading as luck but rather those coincidences, fleeting encounters, that can reorientate not just your day but your life.
When you hear people’s stories of success or of missions accomplished, we tend to focus on the quantifiable – on how hard they must have worked, on the time they invested in training. We like to believe that it’s hard work, ambition and intelligence that deliver results. And while these are key, luck can play a blinder. In some moments fate simply intervenes.
I see this in my career. I did everything I could to get into journalism but it has all been stitched together with pure luck – from a publisher who took time to speak to an over-keen intern to a Canadian journalist who came in for a meeting and got stuck talking to me.
Of course this is not really career or personal advice that you can hand out without sounding like the sort of person who has their cards read (tarot, not credit). But to get where you want to be, or just to keep hold of what you have, you are going to need luck to show up every now and then. Oh and notice when it does, glinting there at your feet.
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