Mel Robbins distinguishes luck from fortune: fortune is what happens to you, luck is how you respond. You can't control being born poor or facing a pandemic, but you can control what you do next. That's where your power is.
First of all, you have to realize that there is a physics to luck.
All of the world is cause and effect, right? Fortune is the things that happen to you. Luck is what you control. And it's very, very important to distinguish between those two things, because people conflate the concept of fortune and luck. And they make a mistake in thinking that everything is just happening to them. Well, of course, There are some things that are out of your control. How tall you are, where you're born, who your parents are. Those are things that are out of your control. That's, you know, you're fortunate or you're unfortunate. Right. And the world is spinning and things are happening. There might be an earthquake, there might be a war.
You might have a— There might be systematic racism. Exactly. There might be poverty. Exactly. There might be all kinds of things.
Exactly. A pandemic. Yes. But you have more control over how you respond to it.
Okay, so I want to make sure I understand this because I would have thought it was the opposite. Because when I hear the word lucky, I think things that happen by chance, things that happen out of the blue, things that happen to certain people that don't happen to me. But when you say there's a big difference between fortune, which to me sounds like the things that you said you don't have control over, but there's a huge group of things that are either positive things of fortune or things that feel unfortunate that are not your fault. You can't change it. But you want us to focus on creating more luck and making things go our way, which is in our control.
Absolutely.
That's a completely different version of luck than I thought.
Well, it's really important. It's critically important to distinguish between the things that happen to you and how you respond. I mean, there's this fabulous, you know, very famous quote by Viktor Frankl about the fact that, you know, the world is happening to you and you have this, this time between stimulus and response where you get to decide how to respond. And that's where luck comes in. It comes in by taking the time to think about how you actually engage with the world. We are in a constant dance with the world where we are either leading or we're following. And there are times in which the world is leading, right? The pandemic happened and our world's all turned upside down, but then you get to decide what you're gonna do with it.
Oprah Winfrey: How to Find Your Unique Purpose, Authentic Power, and Calling in Life
