Never Mistake Lucky for Smart  (2 Min Read) | Vol. 206

June 5, 2026

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” — Cormac McCarthy

Never Mistake Lucky for Smart

You’re out cruising yard sales with a friend, hoping to score a velvet Elvis or the perfect garden gnome. You pick up a brass lamp and a genie pops out. Woah, I’m about to get three wishes! But she shuts that down fast. You get one wish, and it’s multiple choice.

With a flourish, she offers, “You can have a year of lucky decisions or a year of wisdom around the decisions you make. But if you choose luck, you will never understand you were lucky.”

What do you choose? You know there’s a trap. Wishes always come with unintended consequences. 

There are good decisions and bad decisions. Either can yield a good or bad outcome. 

If you’re unlucky, you do all the right things, and it turns out badly. You research the car but still get a lemon. You arrive at the airport early, and the flight gets cancelled. You pick the shortest line at the grocery, which immediately becomes the slowest.

If you’re lucky, a snap decision miraculously comes through. You randomly pick stocks for your retirement fund, and they all go through the roof. You go to the wrong office for your interview and land a job anyway.* And everything you did in college that should have ended in expulsion, the hospital, or a holding tank but somehow didn’t.

Most of the time, we hate being unlucky. It ruins our day. Actually, it can be far worse to mistake being lucky for being smart. Bad decisions tend to breed more bad decisions.

One of my favorite reads is Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, where she refers to this as “resulting.” Resulting is judging the quality of our decisions solely by the outcomes. A former poker champion, she explains how this is the path to bankruptcy in cards and in life. 

So back to our genie. We want to choose wisdom. The goal is to make good decisions and make peace with the outcomes. Learn to do this consistently and people will start to think you must be lucky. 

One question to ponder in your thinking time: Where might I be mistaking luck for skill, and what would change if I knew the difference? 

Make an Impact!
Jay Papasan
Author I CEO I Coach

* This actually happened to a friend. She went to a neighboring architect’s office, who turned out to be hiring, and landed a job.