A convenient way for people to fake humility

Think about one of your more significant accomplishments.

A creative project that makes you feel deeply satisfied as a human being.

Did you have success by chance? Or did you have success because you believed something could be done, and then you simply did it?

Odds are, it will be more of the latter. And not that luck isn’t a very real thing. Because it is.

The power of perfect timing can be an undeniable force in your life. There are many strategies you can leverage to increase your likelihood of positive outcomes. And there are key moves you can perform after fortunate incidents in order to carry their momentum forward. Probability is one of the most underrated skills that you should learn and get good at.

But so are belief, discipline, execution and resilience.

Unlike a force as fickle as luck, those things are actually under your control. They revolve around your experience, not your outcome. The mindsets and approaches and behaviors you apply to your circumstances, not the circumstances themselves.

Sadly, one reason this principle is hard to take ownership over is because pride is so culturally condemned. Anytime we attribute anything to ourselves and not to god or destiny, our puritanical roots grab hold and pull us back to the ground.

You can hear that angry preacher’s fire and brimstone sermon echoes from your childhood:

Pride goeth before the fall, so don’t get too full of yourself.

My question is, what if that was the very reason people were so quick to attribute their success to chance? What if luck was a convenient way for us to fake humility? To downplay our talents and hard work in the name of intervention from a benevolent cosmic force?

Look, it’s important to have a healthy sense of faith and trust in self and other. I believe in some kind of higher power, whatever the hell that means. I trust that nature has its own rhythm of which human beings are only a small part.

But by and large, when it comes to our creative projects, doing the work that makes us satisfied with our quota of usefulness in this world, attributing success solely to luck is naive.

Bottom line is, we are successful because we believed in ourselves, had discipline with ourselves, uncovered talents inside ourselves, took action on behalf of ourselves, and told a life giving story to ourselves.

Because those things, we can control.

Everything else that’s in the hands of the gods is a nice bonus, but it’s not going to be the killer app that takes us to the next level.

To what degree are you attributing success to something external?