P7 – When Preparation Meets Opportunity

"Luck is when preparation meets opportunity." canstockphoto16326239

“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”





Axioms are not science-based; there isn’t often a string of data that can be traced and strung together to prove the postulate. They are often valued for their common-sense approach to complicated subjects.

Like luck, for example.

It is true that there are many instances where pure luck was involved in some event. For example, I buy a lottery ticket, randomly choose some numbers–and win. (This is purely hypothetical–I did not win the lottery, or else I’d be writing this missive from a sunny beach cabana on a private south Pacific island with the pilot of my seaplane awaiting orders for my next destination.)

There was no preparation on my part; the numbers were random, the decision to stop and buy the ticket was unplanned–or was it?

Who is to say that all that I’d done in my life led me to pull into that Speedy Mart to buy the ticket? Could it be that the numbers I chose were subconsciously based on a sequence of significant numerical events in my life; my birthday, my wife’s birthday, the date I had my first kiss, the day I caught my first real fish, the day I got my first car?

Could fate, destiny, fortune, chance, providence or pure luck have been at play?

Perhaps sometimes luck is driven by need or necessity. Maybe the direction of our lives will, from time to time at important milestones in our progression through life, take a turn for the better because we sense the need.

I distinctly remember the day that I–or more accurately my car–turned into the parking lot of the Armed Services Recruiting Center.  I really don’t remember consciously doing it; I’d passed it on my way to and from a go-nowhere job for months, probably seeing it but not acknowledging it.

An hour later, I had signed up to be a United States Marine. That decision changed the course of my life, for the better I would say.

Pure luck could not account for that decision. Something in my past probably prepared me for that moment my hands turned the steering wheel towards a radically new direction in my life.

It was probably due largely to memories of my mother speaking so proudly of her brother who was a Marine in WWII; how she had his picture in dress blues always positioned prominently in front of all the other family portraits. She had other brothers in other services during WWII, but she spoke most reverently about, Her Brother, “The Marine.”

I also remember the angst my father displayed whenever the family got together and his brother-in-laws would start telling war stories.  My dad had been exempted from serving because he was an only-son.  I think that always left him feeling less adequate–like he’d skipped out.

I remember seeing that my two older brothers served, one in the Army, one in the Air Force. I felt it was something I should do, too.

So after a couple years of college and about the same at a job that was not lighting my fire, perhaps my life had been preparing me for that moment I almost passed the recruiting station one more time, but didn’t.

It was like buying that winning lottery ticket; it changed my life.  I became a Marine, I am a Marine forever and you can’t buy that, it is an earned title.

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