What is the most important attribute in becoming successful?

Luck. Yes, you read that correctly. Luck, not hard work. Hard work certainly has its role, but it’s the presence, or absence, of luck that will ultimately determine whether or not someone is successful, or unsuccessful, in achieving their goals.

Reading that first paragraph makes a lot of you feel uncomfortable, doesn’t it? The reason we often overlook the role of luck in our lives is because we want to believe we’re in control – we want to believe that we’ve achieved what we have because of our own doing. Not because of something unpredictable, something we couldn’t foresee. Believing the latter challenges our sense of self-worth and it threatens our ego because it appears to take some of the credit for our accomplishments.

This is known in social psychology as a self-serving bias. We attribute good events to ourselves, whereas anything that doesn’t work out in our favour we attribute to our environment or some extenuating circumstance. We take more of the credit when things go right and less of the blame when things go wrong. It’s a natural human tendency, but one that is not entirely balanced.

When we see people who have succeeded* in their professions, what do we do? We look to their past to explain how they became successful. The fundamental problem with this process though, is that at any given point in their story, no one could have predicted what was going to happen in their future. As Steve Jobs said, “You cannot align the dots moving forward, only when you look back.” Yet, we believe that by understanding someone’s past, we can ultimately predict the future. But what happened in the past couldn’t have been predicted, why? Because the future is unknown. It’s unpredictable. We look favourably on the past because of the hindsight bias – believing unpredictable events were predictable in hindsight.

We do this because humans have an incessant need to make sense of things. We don’t like the unknown. It’s one of the reasons religion offers comfort to individuals, because it makes the unknown (death, how we got here) known. Here’s an example that proves this point, as used in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman: Hitler really loved children and he really loved dogs. That sentence makes you feel a bit uneasy, doesn’t it? It makes us feel uneasy because it’s incongruent with the image we have of Hitler being evil – evil humans don’t like the same things we non-evil humans do. When in reality, Hitler was more like us than he was different. He did what he did not because he was evil, but because certain things happened to him – things that were unforeseeable. Still not convinced luck or opportunity played any role? At one point in his life, there was a 50/50 chance Hitler could have been a girl. Would the same events in history have occurred had this been the case? Unlikely. Luck, then, played a significant role in everything that followed.

Have you ever noticed that when someone achieves something great, we attribute it to their hard work and we never question what other factors contributed to their success? Yet, when someone doesn’t achieve something, we immediately question their integrity and commitment to working hard? Again, we do this because we want to believe that our future is within our control. It’s the same reason we believe that if we work hard enough, we can achieve anything we want. But the truth is, if you’re never given an opportunity, you won’t achieve much at all. You can be the world’s best soccer player and live in a desert, and if no scout ever comes to that desert, well, you probably won’t get very far in becoming a professional soccer player.

Luck, when it comes to our achievements, should be viewed in a similar fashion to the likelihood of finding a future partner. Almost everyone knows that predicting a connection between two people is almost impossible and the only reason you and your current partner, or previous partners, ever met is because of nothing more than luck and timing. It doesn’t matter how “hard you worked” or “how great a person you are” you could never have predicted meeting the person you did. Our lives are no different.

Here’s another concept that aids in supporting the role that luck plays in an individual’s future – regression to the mean. This means that if someone has an excellent game one week (I’m thinking of soccer here, but this same theory applies to other sports and professions too), they are likely to either have an average game the following week or worse, a below average game the following week. Why? Because individuals cannot constantly perform above average – 50% of the time an individual will play above their average, and 50% of time they will play below their average. Now, what’s the likelihood then, that a potential scout will be at the game and the individual will be playing above average? Well, 50% in this example. What’s the likelihood that the player won’t be injured? Or that the scout is looking for that particular position that the individual plays? Or that the individual will fit the age bracket of what the scout is seeking? And what’s the likelihood that the individual’s personality will be compatible with that of the recruiter? When you take all these other factors into consideration, you soon realise that very little control of whether that individual gets selected is actually within their control and much more lies within luck – being at the right place at the right time.

I’ve seen this multiple times within the sporting world – opportunities are awarded to some individuals and not others, despite those others being equally, if not more, qualified. How can this be explained? Our mind tries to rationalise people’s decisions by finding causal explanations. “Oh that first person must have been better." Or, "They must have worked harder.” When in actual fact, that first person was just lucky. And the others, unlucky. The Matthew Effect also plays a role. This effect suggests that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – more opportunities will be presented to those whose names are known than to those whose names aren’t. That is why a CEO of one company is much more likely to become a CEO of another company than someone who isn’t a CEO of any company.

This cognitive bias is something we’re all susceptible to. We choose the name that looks familiar. Because it’s easier. And their name is readily available in our mind (also known as the availability heuristic). And the risk of choosing them and them not being successful is far less than choosing an unknown individual and that individual not succeeding. Humans do not like deviating from the norm or from what is easy, so we stick to what we know and to what is readily available.

Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, explains this extremely well in his aforementioned book. As he states, “It is difficult to imagine people lining up at airport bookstores to buy a book that enthusiastically describes the practices of business leaders who, on average, do somewhat better than chance. Consumers have a hunger for a clear message about the determinants of success and failure in business, and they need stories that offer a sense of understanding, however illusory,” (p. 206). We believe that by studying experts, we too might become an expert. What we neglect to consider though, is the role that luck has played in their story of becoming successful. Who would buy a book that focused more on luck than on an individual’s attributes? Not many. Because it lacks a major selling piece, hope.

It isn’t all doom and gloom though. Hard work has its role. Obviously the harder you work, the longer you stay in the game and the more opportunities you have for luck to play a role in your favour. But the opposite is also true – the more opportunity you have to become unlucky too. We like to attribute our misfortunes to something bigger than ourselves – but how can you explain a child getting cancer? Or someone getting in a car accident on their way to work? Was that always “part of their story”, or did they just happen to be extremely unlucky? It seems silly to believe hard work could have prevented either of these tragedies, so why then do we believe hard work is the recipe for the converse, success? Does luck not play more of a role?

I recently posed this question to someone close to me – I asked them if hard work or luck had played more of a role in their owning of a business. Their response, “fifty-fifty”. I challenged this though – how hard had this individual actually worked? What had they given up to own this business? How did they come to obtain this business? And the answer lies not in their hard work, but in the opportunity they were presented – the former business owner unfortunately passed away suddenly, gifting the business to his two employees. Without this strike of luck, this individual could very well still be working “hard” without owning a business. But it was the opportunity that contributed more to their owning of a business than it was their own doing.

I’ve been guilty of believing that if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything you want in life. But my recent experiences over the past few years have forced me to question that. I look at what I’ve achieved (and conversely what I haven’t) and I look at what others have achieved. Is it true that they have worked harder than me? No, it isn’t. The truth is, they’ve been luckier than I have. Luckier with injuries (or lack of), luckier with coaches, and luckier with just general opportunities. I look at those who are like me, those that didn’t achieve what they perhaps set out to achieve, and what do they all have in common? Not a lack of willpower, or dedication, or commitment, they were all just unlucky. Suffering career ending injuries – how can you predict that? How can you prevent that? The truth? You can’t. Because the future, no matter how much we study the past, will never be predictable. Because life isn’t predictable. So my departing question to you is this – what role has luck played in your life? Remembering that we luck into where we’re born, what we’re born into, and what opportunities are presented to us.

*Succeeded by definition of achieving what they initially set out to achieve.

A work in progress

The only thing that’s constant in life is change. Our state of mind is never guaranteed. That’s why striving for happiness is an unobtainable feat. Happiness is temporary. As is its opposing emotion, sadness. But each cannot exist without the other. My former blog post was written from a place of clarity, of sound mind. But that isn’t something I experience all the time. Logically, I can understand almost anything put in front of me. So logically, I know this isn’t the end for me with regards to soccer. I know there are great things to come from this adversity. But emotionally? I’m still hurting. I’m still struggling. I’m still grieving. And I’m still healing. And I will be for some time.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have good days, because I do. And that’s one of the most common misperceptions about life – we think it’s a linear journey towards success. But it never is. It’s always filled with obstacles, setbacks, detours, and quite often, entirely different directions. Anyone who has suffered from a mental illness is never fully “cured” – they’re still a work in progress and always will be. And perhaps that’s one of the beautiful things about being human, we’re complex beings with multifaceted emotions.

I’m currently tormented with what my head knows makes logical sense and what my heart is aching for. At what point do you need to accept that the dream and goal you are chasing was never intended for you? Is the universe “testing” you, putting you through these significant adversities so that you can one day assist someone else who goes through similar? Or is the universe guiding you and you’re ignoring its messages? When do you decide to let go of what filled your life with your greatest joy? Can you ever do that without wondering “what if”?

I look at the people who represent our country in an array of different sports and logically, I know they’re not the best. They’re the ones that have been gifted with opportunity and timing. So what do you tell someone who has aspirations of representing their country or playing at the highest level, but a body that has been broken more times than it’s been whole? Or who has had more coaches overlook them than they have advocate for them? Are these all merely obstacles to overcome or are they messages guiding the individual to an alternate life?

One of the things I’ve been struggling with is how, from my experiences, the ones that get ahead in the sporting realm are not the ones that are team players. Not the ones that show great character. It’s the ones that advocate for themselves. The ones that put themselves before the team. The ones that vocally complain. And quite often, those individuals have actually captained their teams. And this isn’t just limited to sport, either. I’ve seen it in academia, in the workplace, and in families. The individuals that make the most noise are the ones that get rewarded. Not the ones that are doing what’s in the best interests of the bigger picture; their team.

Perhaps this is one reason why I’m struggling so much – because I don’t fit in with this dog-eat-dog mentality that is needed to succeed here in the Western world. My heart yearns for something bigger; it yearns for the comradery you build when you sacrifice your own individual performance for the betterment of the team. And I’ve always been that way – putting others before myself because I believe that’s what a leader does. But I ask this question again, where has this mentality gotten me?

In my logical thinking world, I can see how others have achieved their success and I too could make those changes and become my own selfish advocate. But emotionally, it’s just not me. Part of life is accepting all aspects of yourself, even those you wish you could change. I know there’s reasons behind my struggle. And these reasons will probably be so that I can create a team in which the aforementioned self-advocating individuals have no place. Through pain we can create beauty. And I know this. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Life is unfair, I know that. You know that. We all know that. But that knowledge doesn’t stop anyone from feeling the inevitable despair that comes along with that reality.

When it comes to role models, in essence what we see is what they are doing and we aspire to have that. We try to align our paths with theirs. So we do what they did – we commit to that goal. But there’s a fundamental flaw to this: others’ paths are not our own. You can do what the most successful people in the world do and still never become successful. How much of that is within your control and how much of that is beyond our human comprehension? We believe we can achieve anything. And our recent understanding of the brain’s neuroplasticity would support this claim. And it’s a great belief to hold, because control lies within us. But again, it’s flawed. Flawed because it neglects to account for something bigger than our physiology – it neglects to account for the fact that often opportunity dictates our direction in life.

How many people do you know are doing what they always dreamed they would do? And how many people instead have ended up in jobs they never even considered but have since accepted this is actually their path?

I currently sit with a blank space in front of me. I have no idea what I’m doing next year. And that in itself can be overwhelming. And it is at times. We as humans don’t like the unknown. We don’t like surrendering. We don’t like not being in control. And so I’m trying to let go. Letting go of people and things and allowing what is supposed to be to fall into place. But this hasn't been easy. I'm uncomfortable. I'm hurting. I'm struggling. But I know it's necessary. I’ve removed myself from certain environments because they’re too triggering. How can I be around an environment that serves as a constant reminder of what I had, but no longer do? What I could have been, but no longer will? By avoiding these triggers, am I ultimately just prolonging the pain? Or am I doing what I need to survive, to keep my head above the water? Because at times I feel like I’m going under. And I know, this is part of grieving. There’ll be days where you’re swimming comfortably, and others where you’re gasping for air, drowning in your thoughts and emotions. As shit as those days are, deep down I know this is all just an unglorified work in progress.

Some dreams don't come true

I admit, I was probably a little dramatic with my last blog post. I was hurt. Frustrated. Devastated. After working so hard, doing everything “right”, I’m right back to where I was five years ago when I did my second knee. It doesn’t feel fair. It feels fucking cruel. But perhaps it was necessary. Necessary so I finally accept what numerous people have told me over the years – soccer isn’t my final destination. It has most definitely been a part of my journey, but my writing is what will take me further. My writing about soccer. About life. Love. Pain. I see the world differently than most. I’m devoted to understanding others – even if that means taking a hard look at myself and my role in the outcomes.

My knee for instance. I know why I did it again. There’s something that’s been present in all three injuries. And being in September isn’t the only reason. But it’s something I don’t want to talk about. It’s something I’m not ready to confront. To accept. Because it means I’m responsible. And right now, I don’t want that. I don’t want to take responsibility for something so devastating. I’m not ready for that reality. So instead, I’ll keep playing the victim for a little bit longer, even though in my heart I know that I’m the reason I did my knee again.

I also know I’m not the only person who has experienced this. I was reading about Alex Johnson, the AFL footballer who has done one of his knees five times and the other knee once. Six knee reconstructions. Same age. Still with the same aspirations – of playing football at the highest level. What keeps him motivated? How does he know this was meant for him? How has he not quit? Is it because everyone’s expecting him to, and he wants to prove them wrong? Because he’s worried about who he is if he isn’t chasing that dream? Because those have been my fears. Who am I without soccer? Soccer’s been my life for most of my life. It’s taken me to America, around America, and through some of my highest highs and lowest lows. How do you let something like that go?

Rewind to the start of this year. The blog post I wrote about feeling valued. How great it felt to be playing, and playing fucking well with a team that respected me. Things changed throughout the season and I was pretty miserable – frequently crying after trainings and games, feeling targeted, attacked. It made me want to quit. But once things were addressed, they got better and I became very adamant on playing overseas in Italy. I then had an amazing elimination final game, only to tear my acl a week later. Every time I’m playing at my peak, I do a knee. Why?

My strength and conditioning coach said it’s the way I play. But I don’t think it is. I changed the way I played after my second one and I still ended up here. I honestly just think soccer wasn’t meant for me. And my lesson, with all of this, is learning to accept that. To let go of the bitterness of others’ successes. Success I feel I deserved. Had worked for. Was worthy of. But was overlooked. In a world where everything is posted online, it’s so hard to remove yourself from that environment. Everything serves as a reminder. It’s like a bad break up – I recall writing in my blog post “Moving on in the 21st century” practical advice about how to get over an ex. Well in essence, this is no different. I’m breaking up with soccer and I can’t be reminded of what I had and no longer do. Or what I could have had but never will. So perhaps that’s my solution while I grieve – removing myself from social media again. From any reminders that reopen those wounds. At least until those wounds have healed, physically and emotionally.

I caught up with a friend the week before I did my knee and this is what she asked – why do you want to make it so badly? Why are you seeking that validation externally? Maybe that’s why you’ve never made it – because you feel you need to make it to feel worthy instead of feeling worthy without having made it. And maybe that’s why you keep getting overlooked. Because you’ve never learnt that lesson. And she was right. I felt like I needed to make it to feel like I was good enough. But I already was good enough. Already am good enough. Even if coaches have overlooked me. As I write this, I feel myself getting worked up and angry because I don’t feel like others have had to go through the same shit I have in order to have “made it” – they’ve just been given their successes. So why have I had to suffer so much? It feels so unfair. But perhaps this is the reason – my writing. Without this pain, what would I write about? How would people connect with me, relate to me?

After my second acl, I had nothing to come back for. No family for support. No school to distract me. Not many supportive friends. I had no purpose. No purpose to my suffering. My pain. I had no reason to keep going. And I almost didn’t. February 15th I almost ended my life. But I didn’t. And surviving that became my purpose. I was driven to talk about my experiences. To share my story. To talk about suicide, mental health, pain, and suffering as though it was as normal as it is. I vouched to be the voice of those who no longer had a voice. And so that darkness drove me to see light in every crevice of life.

Four years on and I’m in a very similar physical situation; a torn acl. But everything feels different. I have my family. I have supportive friends. I have a strength and conditioning environment that embraces me rather than makes me feel like a burden. I have my writing. But most importantly, I have a purpose to this pain. And I have perspective. At 21, when I did my second knee, I thought that was it for soccer. I threw myself into coaching hoping that would fill the void in my heart. But I knew I wasn’t done. So after two years coaching, I decided to play again. And play I did. Really fucking well at that. But now I’m 26, a third acl later. Even though I have those same thoughts of never playing soccer again, there’s a part of me that is at peace with that. It still hurts, because it’s still raw. But I think this is where things start to happen for me, outside of soccer.

When and if I have surgery, I have this book to write. And I suspect a major theme in it will be from the perspective of someone who never made it in the way they had envisioned. Which is something I believe probably 95% of us can relate to. Not the 5% who have made it – the ones who write books about their lives and their struggle to success. How much they wanted to quit, but never did. That’s all well and good, but they did make it. They’re writing from hindsight. From the perspective of having already “made it”. They probably never wrote about their struggle as they were experiencing it. Because who would buy that depressing shit? Instead, people buy books from these successful athletes and entrepreneurs because it gives them hope that one day they might make it too. But the reality is, you probably won’t. And you’ll probably be left in a similar situation to me – angry and bitter about the cards you’ve been dealt. Resentful towards those who have had it so much easier. Frustrated you won’t achieve what you’ve wanted. Who teaches you how to process those feelings? Actually, who even talks about these feelings? Because I can guarantee I’m not the only person who’s felt this way. And that is why I write. To help you normalise what might not feel normal. To help you realise it’s okay to hurt. To be angry. To be resentful. It’s actually fucking human to feel those things.

So perhaps what you need is to find a purpose to your pain. I don’t believe any suffering is ever in vain. Perhaps you’re suffering now so you can be there for someone who will go through something similar in the future. To connect to them in a way they’ve never had before. And perhaps that connection and understanding might just save their life. So that’s where I am right now – trying to find a purpose to this pain. And trying to accept the reality that some dreams, no matter how much you want them, won’t come true in the way you envisioned. And that’s okay. Because sometimes what you actually receive might be better than anything you could have ever envisioned.