Weekend Engagement - 90% Hard Work 10% Luck

Do you believe in luck or do you believe hard work and preparation creates "luck"?

I am a firm believer that it's always hard work and preparation that plays the larger part of one's success. Of course, luck is always a random factor and cannot be ruled out. Putting these two thoughts together, my personal view is 90% hard work and 10% luck.

Some of us look at successful people and sometimes brush off their achievements by saying things like "they were just lucky", but the reality is often far from this. In this world, many people put in hard work to achieve the personal goals and ambitions, and just because they don't announce to the whole world, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

So let me give 3 examples.

First, Olympics/sport athletes. The Olympics Games just ended not long ago. I caught glimpses of various sports, and also read some background stories about the training and circumstances that some of the athletes went through, I was really impressed and felt that these athletes deserved their recognition and awards. For instance, some athletes started training when they were just kids. Unlike most of us, who could play with our friends after school, they train endless hours every single days, just to perfect the technique or become better at what they do. To have that level of consistency, discipline, motivation, and hunger is something that words cannot describe.

Second, financial wealth. Personal finance is an area that I always have interest in, and I do follow some content creators/influencers on various social media channels to educate myself as well as to see different perspectives from people from all walks of life. There is one group that is so well versed in analysing market trends and they have consistently achieved profits in their trading.

If I could use an example, so there was this content creator whom I think spent a lot of effort studying AI related cryptocurrencies. In September (just 2 months ago), he put USD 35,000 in this cryptocurrency called VIRTUAL. At that time it was trading was at 0.03 per token.

Fast forward two months to today, VIRTUAL is currently trading at 1.63. If you would do the math, this person has turned USD 35,000 into around USD 1.6 million within 2 months. And I am not kidding.

Of course, I am not asking you to pour all your savings into VIRTUAL. In fact, I don't own any VIRTUAL at all because I generally don't buy things that I don't understand or haven't done my due diligence. My point is, the content creator must have done a lot of homework on this project, to be convicted enough to put a good amount of money into this token, and when the token went up, he didn't take profit at 2x, 10x or even 20x, and he continued to believe the potential of this project and it would go higher. Is this luck? I don't think so. If this was just a mindless gamble, most of us I think would have exited when it doubled or tripled.

I was sharing this crazy stuff with my friends the other day, and it was just "sadly" interesting that while most of us are slogging our hours off at our daily work everyday for our monthly wage, there are smart people who are able to trade and make a million in 2 months. Lol.

Finally, back to somewhere closer, that's Hive. So, 18 days ago, I received a record amount of votes and rewards for my post about Maldives. In my entire 3 years on Hive, most of my posts are in the range of single digit rewards, and I have never gotten such an astronomical number of 55.35. I generally don't have much expectations when I write on Hive because rewards are just an additional bonus to me, but I have to admit that I was delighted (and stunned too!) with this amount of appreciation and recognition from the community.

Was I lucky? Probably. But this definitely wouldn't be possible if it was my first few posts on Hive. Over the 3 years, I have posted in various communities, engaged with many awesome people, and I think all these "hard work and preparation" played a significant role in this outcome. I believe there are curators who see the effort behind the creation of my posts, and always trying to improve on my writing and content. And I definitely feel very thankful and honoured.

Rounding up, I think there are many more examples that could show how hard work and preparation is the key to success, but I hope the above 3 examples have given you some food for thought! Alright, that's all I have for this week! Thanks for reading and have a restful weekend!