bottegha. @bottgeha - Twitter Profile

diana, you got lucky. before you come for me, give me 45 seconds of your time. i don’t mean you didn’t earn it. i mean something specific that made me angry when someone told me the same thing, and only made sense to me much later when i sat down and thought honestly about my own life. (even while writing this, i don’t really still believe in luck) someone called my progress luck and i was ready to fight. i thought about the years i sacrificed, the nights i didn’t sleep, the times i kept going when nothing was working. then i realized something - imagine a version of me that didn’t have the necessary access or tools he won’t achieve same result or maybe better (who knows?) think about it someone else have repeated similar path on other projects and didn’t get any better result. luck is not only a coin flip. luck is the entire stage you were placed on before the play even started. the country some were born in, the year you were born, the family that fed you while you figured things out, the friend who happened to retweet your work to the right person, the people that onboarded you. you didn’t choose any of those. they chose you. researchers studied this with hockey players in canada and found something that stops you cold. 40% of pros in the top leagues were born in january, february, or march. only 10% in october, november, december. being born early in the year makes you four times more likely to play professionally. the reason is that kids leagues start the season in january. the kids born early are slightly bigger and faster than kids born late in the same group. coaches give them more attention, more game time, better tournaments. that tiny edge compounds(luck) for fifteen years until they reach the NHL. ask any of those players how they made it. they will say discipline, training, waking up at 5am. none of them will say january. but january is why they are there. your january exists somewhere too. mine does. diana’s does. it’s the thing you didn’t choose that made the work you did choose actually pay off. someone else, working just as hard, with the wrong january, didn’t get the same return. this isn’t an attack on effort. effort is required. you cannot luck your way past someone who is genuinely prepared when the door opens. but in a world where ten thousand equally hungry, equally talented, equally relentless people are pushing on the same door, something has to decide which one of them gets through. successful people almost never see their luck. not because they are dishonest. because the brain doesn’t store luck. it stores effort. you remember the hours. you don’t remember the ten quiet moments where things could have gone the other way and didn’t. so the story you tell yourself, and everyone else, edits luck out completely. diana, you earned your spot. and something put you on the right stage to earn it. both are true. the people who refuse to admit the second half are the ones who look at someone else struggling and assume that person just didn’t want it badly enough. funny part - you can make and manipulate your own luck.

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