Lessons Learned from the Greats (II)
An hitchikers guide to getting the most out of life
Before I go any further, let me introduce myself. If you already know me, feel free to skip this as most of my subscribers are family, friends, friends of friends, crushes, and course-mates.
So here it goes…
Abímbóla is supposedly an 18-year-old writer and soon-to-be author, with nothing particularly special about him at first glance. Just a very average Engineering student who is somehow more obsessed with liberal arts and philosophy than engineering itself. A self-proclaimed lover boy who has never had a girlfriend (yet) but is surprisingly good at writing love letters.
Abímbóla is bad at almost every sport you can think of. He doesn’t know how to play online games, even the most popular ones. Oh yes, he can’t sing or play any instrument, and if you try to have a conversation with him, he will probably say the most unhinged things.
Besides his ordinary life, Abímbóla is a man with many fears: heartbreak, embarrassment, cockroaches, blood, heights, public speaking… (the list goes on). But if there is one fear that towers over all the rest, it is this: being average. Or, to use a more precise word, mediocrity.
Koinophobia: the fear of having lived an ordinary life.
Abímbóla fears dying ordinary, without being remembered. He fears living a life without purpose. Ironically, his life, okay, my life, some months ago was almost a succinct example of what i feared.
Early this year, Abímbóla had an epiphany in the first quarter: to stop being lived by life and start living life. In simpler terms, “to stop being ordinary.” If Abímbóla was running from ordinary, and the antonym of ordinary is “extraordinary, exceptional, special, uncommon, great” then Abímbóla wanted to be extraordinary. Or, in a more stellar phrase: “Abímbóla wants to be among the greats.”
It quietly became an obsession. And obsession came with questions: What does it really take to be among the greats? No one he knew had good enough answers. So he turned to books, tonnes of them, both the good, bad and the boring. Biographies of the greats. He read about Confucius and Buddha (though at this point, it was more a search for purpose than greatness). He devoured TED Talks, commencement speeches on YouTube. From J.K. Rowling to Matthew McConaughey, even Steve Jobs.
Since Abímbóla is me, and I am Abímbóla, my reading, searching, listening, and a couple of other things led me to writing this series I call Lessons Learned from the Great.
If you’ve made it to this point, welcome. This is part two. If you missed the first one, one, you can read Lessons Learned From the Great (I) or just jump straight into the good stuff below.
The God of Luck Favours The Brave And Relentless
For one, I inherently believe that luck exists and that it is fundamental to success in any endeavor. I picture it as a kind of glitch in our observable universe — a mysterious anomaly we can never fully debug, no matter how hard we try. To downplay its role in the journeys of the most successful and extraordinary people is both quixotic and myopic. Luck is always there. It is the invisible hand, the X factor we cannot explain, the thread that somehow makes everything make sense, quietly turning the impossible to the plausible.
And nowhere is this more evident than in the journeys of extraordinary people. Luck in some sense played a very real role in Bill Gates becoming a billionaire. If he hadn’t been born to parents who could afford to send him to Lakeside School, one of the only high schools in the world in the late 1960s with its own computer, the story would have unfolded differently. That tiny anomaly in his timeline gave him early access to programming, put him in the path of Paul Allen, and sparked the idea that software could be the future. Remove that single stroke of luck, no Lakeside, no early computer, no Allen, and Microsoft probably wouldn’t exist.
Another paradigmatic example is J.K. Rowling, the world’s first billionaire author. People forget that the entire Harry Potter franchise rests on luck just as much as talent. The whole idea started on a delayed train from Manchester to London. If that train had arrived on time, she might never have sat long enough for the story to crystallize, and maybe we’d have “Henry Potter” or even nothing at all.
Even after she wrote the book, publishers practically lined up to say no. What changed everything was an editor’s eight-year-old daughter who picked up the first chapter, got hooked instantly, and convinced her father to take a chance. Without that train delay or that curious kid, there’s no Hogwarts, no Voldemort, no Dumbledore — just another unpublished manuscript.
I could go on, naming one extraordinary person after another, example after example. The pattern is always the same. Luck is there, quietly shaping the timing, the circumstances, the tiny invisible accidents. But to overplay its role, to pretend it alone creates greatness, is both delusional and misleading.
Bill Gates could have ignored programming entirely, chasing parties or some fleeting dopamine rush, and Microsoft as we know it would never exist. J.K. Rowling could have walked away after rejection, abandoning her passion for writing and leaving millions without Hogwarts, Ron, or Voldemort. Even Steve Jobs could have skipped that calligraphy class, and the Macintosh might have ended up just another computer.
The thing is, everyone in some way gets lucky, even if we rarely notice it. Luck isn’t some exclusive gift reserved for a select few; it quietly shows up for all of us. In fact, our very existence is a product of chance — if a different spermatozoon had fertilized the ovum, the consciousness you experience today might never exist. Every life, every moment, carries traces of luck we barely perceive.
It’s from observing these subtle patterns in my reading, in the stories I’ve listened to, and in the lives of extraordinary people I have read about that I’ve begun to grasp how luck works, at least to some extent. A few things stand out.
First: Popular luck, the gargantuan kind that precedes astronomical success and fuels the myth of overnight achievement, grows in direct proportion to the amount of risks we take.
Second: Perhaps even more important in its simplicity, luck is the remnant of design
Luck Is Proportional To The Amount Of Risks You Take
I’ve come to realize that luck behaves a lot like probability. stay with me…
There is something in statistics called the Law of Large Numbers, and the idea is simple: the more tries you take, the closer you get to the result you’re “supposed” to get.
Think about it like this. If I asked you for the probability of getting tails in a fair coin toss, you’d confidently say 50 percent. That’s the intuitive answer. Expected outcome divided by total possible outcomes gives you 1 over 2 which is 0.5 or 50 percent.
But flip that coin for real. Do it two or three times and you might not see a single tail. Flip it ten times and you might get tails only three times which is 0.3 or 30 percent. Even after twenty flips, your results can still be far from the neat 50 percent. So is maths wrong?
Not at all. If you keep going, something interesting happens. At 100 flips, your results start creeping toward 0.5. Maybe you see tails 44 percent of the time. At 1000 flips, the number gets even closer. You’ll likely see tails around 50 percent. In other words, the more trials you run, the closer you get to the expected probability. And luck behaves the exact same way. The more trials, risks, attempts, shots, experiments, projects, conversations, and opportunities you take in life, the more you open yourself to luck. Every try is another flip.
If you flip the coin just twice, you will most likely end up getting nothing. Flip it a hundred times and you start seeing patterns. Flip it a thousand times and luck eventually shows up. Not because you’re chosen. Not because God suddenly started taking special interest in you. But because you increased your attempts and expanded the sample size of your life. In essence, you gave luck more chances to find you. So behind the seeming incoherent randomness, luck is actually very predictable.
P.s i decided to run a simulated die throw… This is the 10th trial
The 100th trial…
The 900th trial..
Luck Is The Remnant Of Design
The phrase sounds quite brainy and reticent, and trust me, I didn’t understand it at first.
Does it mean luck is simply the result of planning, hard work and perseverance? Or does it mean luck is what’s left when you have done everything you can?
Writing about this now and looking back in hindsight, I have realized it doesn’t have to be one or the other, as two truths can both coexist. You can create your own luck and at the same time, no amount of action will ever erase luck completely.
On one hand, effort manufactures opportunities. The more you move, the more the world moves with you. On the other hand, luck is ubiquitous. It sits inside every plan, because things rarely go as planned, and nothing ever goes exactly as we script it in our heads.
But even though both are true, there is a sequence to it and the order is not interchangeable. You must first put in effort, work hard and persist, then luck shows up. Only after you have pushed consistently will luck ever have the chance to find you.
A coin toss is the simplest example. Toss it once and anything can happen. Toss it a hundred times and you slowly pull the odds into your favour. Effort pulls luck closer.
This is why I find it almost insulting when people point at someone successful and say they were lucky. They talk as if luck is innate. They praise the outcome and ignore the process — the failures, the persistence, the constant reinvention, the obsessive discipline. People like that will never understand what truly makes someone successful.
So what I have learned is this: we are all designers of our own destiny. Anything can happen in this world, but nothing will happen for you if you do nothing. Wanting a difference without lifting a finger is the fastest route to bitterness. You cannot sit quietly waiting for luck to first approve you. Luck doesn’t come to people who wait. It comes to people who move. It favours the brave and the relentless.
And only through reliance on yourself — your actions, your grind, your ability to keep showing up — can you increase your chances of controlling the direction of your life and the flavour of your luck.
So remember, designing luck is designing life. Every choice, every risk, every attempt is a brick in the foundation. And if you must wait for luck to visit, wait actively. Guide it, attract it, and shape it. Because luck is not magic. It is motion. And motion is always in your hands.
The Takeaway
Yes, there are people who got lucky without effort, but you should know: for every rule, there will always be outliers and exceptions. You are far more likely to follow the rule than become the exception. Counting on being the exception is the quickest way to disappoint yourself.
Putting in effort and failing while waiting for luck gets tiring, honestly. It drains you. It makes you question yourself. But we must all persevere. Hoping alone is futile. Talent is never enough. Unprecedented talents exist everywhere, and geniuses who accomplish nothing are more common than we admit. Education isn’t enough either. The world is full of people who know a lot and still do little.
Only perseverance, determination and action will never be a disadvantage. They are the only things luck respects consistently — the only things that never betray you. And if you hold on to them long enough, life will bend. It has no choice.
So the final responsibility rests on us, not on chance.
Because we are the masters of our fate. And the captains of our soul.
Hi Reader, I’m not a motivational speaker, not even close. I’m just obsessed with living an unconventional life and inspiring people to aim higher.
I send this email every week . If you want to be part of this small tribe of 27+ people who refuse to live the conventional script, you can join us too.
👉 If you enjoyed reading this, feel free to share it with someone who needs it, or tap the ♥️ button so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏