I was about to post on this topic when I checked my email and the latest blog / email from Seth Godin was waiting for me to read. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/joining-the-luc.html

As always, he’s brilliant.

It’s a very Randian thought, in some ways – creating your own luck. I suppose it’s Darwinian, too.

Everybody’s heard the phrase "the rich get richer", but that’s generally because the rich know how to attract money.

And how famous (and rich) people never have to pay for anything, they get free meals, free shwag, comped everything.

To the layperson, it doesn’t seem "fair". They obviously don’t understand that the restaurant owner profits more from that famous person visiting his or her restaurant than by charging them for a meal.

To some of those famous people – primarily the Britney Spears’ of the world who have not, on their own, earned it – they begin to think of that treatment as their birthright, and destroy the luck pipeline that they had coming to them.

But then there are those people, or businesses, or entities that Godin refers to. From the outside, luck just seems to keep piling up in their favor, inexplicably. From the inside, though, it’s a calculated, planned-for, methodically determined effort to attract "luck".

Kind of like how every "overnight success" takes 10 years. A decade of planning, working, building a foundation, trial and error, failure and learning, until voila! The tipping point, the viral spread, and that pipeline of luck that flows fast and hard.

What has been going through my head, that sparked this post initially (before the Godin thing), is that it’s powerful to know that one is creating one’s own luck. For me to know how and why "luck" happened means that it’s possible to recreate that luck in other arenas, in other facets of life, repeatedly.

Sure, God and divine destiny and all that plays into it – but more and more I think that God really does help those who help themselves, when it’s in line with why they were created.

And when I have the "why", and then the "how", and the methodology starts working, it really does snowball quickly. It’s exciting and scary and mesmerizing all at once.

But it has nothing to do with opportunity knocking. It has to do with hitting the streets and knocking on every door to find opportunity.

Luck doesn’t happen. I create it.