In September 1928, a Scottish bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming returned to his laboratory at St Mary’s Hospital in London after spending some time away and found something rather inconvenient waiting for him.
Before leaving, Fleming had been studying Staphylococcus bacteria, and like many researchers working in a busy laboratory, he had accumulated a collection of culture plates that were hardly models of perfect scientific housekeeping. One of those plates had become contaminated by a mould, which ordinarily would have meant little more than throwing it away and starting again.
Except Fleming noticed something.
Around the mould, the bacteria had disappeared.
It was an accident. Fleming hadn’t designed an experiment intended to produce the phenomenon, he hadn’t deliberately introduced the mould, and he certainly hadn’t arrived at work that morning knowing he was about to observe something that would eventually contribute to one of the most important medical discoveries of the twentieth century.
The mould had simply arrived.
You could reasonably call that luck.
But there is another part of the story that matters just as much, because contaminated laboratory plates presumably existed before Fleming’s and countless scientists had undoubtedly discarded failed or contaminated experiments without giving them another thought. Fleming happened to be a trained bacteriologist with the curiosity and experience to look at something that wasn’t supposed to happen and wonder whether the mistake might be telling him something.
The accident was luck.
Recognising that the accident mattered was something else entirely.
And somewhere in the space between those two things lies a much more interesting answer to the question of whether luck is real.
Because, of course, luck is real.
The mistake we make is assuming that admitting this somehow means our lives are controlled by it.
We tend to discuss luck as though there are only two possible explanations for what happens to us. Either successful people earned their outcomes through intelligence, courage, persistence and hard work, or they were simply fortunate enough to have circumstances fall in their favor. Real life is rarely that tidy.
Someone can work extraordinarily hard and still benefit enormously from being in the right place at the right time. Another person can receive an unexpected opportunity and then spend years doing difficult work to turn it into something meaningful. A business can succeed because its founder made brilliant decisions while also benefiting from launching into a market just as consumer behaviour changed. Someone’s career can be transformed by an accidental introduction, but that introduction may have gone nowhere if they hadn’t spent the previous decade developing the abilities that made the other person interested in them.
These aren’t contradictions. They are simply different forces operating on the same outcome.
Yet we often resist that complexity because the stories at either extreme are much easier to tell. If we attribute everything to luck, we can convince ourselves that outcomes are largely outside our control. If we eliminate luck completely, we can construct an equally comforting world in which everybody gets exactly what their effort and decisions deserve.
Neither world exists.
You didn’t choose where you were born, the economic circumstances of your childhood, your genetic inheritance, the people who happened to cross your path when you were young or the historical period into which you arrived. You couldn’t control whether the company you joined immediately before a recession survived, whether a technology unexpectedly made your particular skill enormously valuable, or whether the stranger beside you at an event happened to know the person you had been trying to meet for years.
Chance is woven through our lives whether we acknowledge it or not.
The more useful question, therefore, isn’t whether luck exists. It is what we do about the fact that it does.
There is a curious asymmetry in the way human beings explain success, particularly when the success being explained belongs to us.
When somebody else builds a successful company, we may notice that they entered the market at exactly the right time, had wealthy parents, knew influential people or caught an extraordinary break. When we succeed, however, the story tends to be populated by the nights we worked late, the risks we took, the problems we solved and the occasions when we kept going after other people would have stopped.
The interesting thing is that both versions may contain truth.
The entrepreneur really may have worked for years to build the company, while also having been extraordinarily fortunate to meet a future business partner by accident. The executive really may have earned a promotion through competence, while also benefiting from a manager who happened to recognise their ability. The musician really may have practised relentlessly for fifteen years, while also owing a crucial career break to someone unexpectedly hearing a performance on exactly the right night.
Success stories become deceptive when we reconstruct them backwards because, once we know how the story ends, everything that happened beforehand begins to look as though it was leading inevitably towards that conclusion.
It wasn’t. There were other possible endings all along. And this is why one of the most useful ways to think about luck is not as an alternative to effort, but as something that interacts with it.
We tend to overestimate luck when explaining other people's success and underestimate it when explaining our own.
Recognising that doesn’t diminish achievement. It simply makes our understanding of achievement more honest.
Imagine two equally capable people who want to build careers in the same industry.
The first does excellent work but spends most of their time inside a relatively small professional circle. They rarely attend events, seldom publish anything publicly, don’t contact people they don’t already know and generally wait until an opportunity has a clear reason to appear before pursuing it.
The second does equally good work but behaves differently. They attend conferences occasionally, talk to strangers, publish ideas, experiment with projects outside their normal responsibilities, contact people whose work interests them and sometimes say yes to opportunities without knowing precisely where those opportunities might lead.
Neither person can command good fortune to appear.
But one of them has created considerably more places where an unexpected event could intersect with their life.
This is sometimes described as increasing your luck surface area, and while the phrase can sound slightly like motivational jargon, the underlying principle is surprisingly practical. The more people you encounter, ideas you explore, things you attempt and environments you enter, the greater the number of opportunities you create for something you could not have planned to happen.
That doesn’t mean endlessly networking, accepting every invitation or turning life into a frantic campaign to maximise opportunity. It simply means recognising that chance needs somewhere to occur.
If you never submit the manuscript, you cannot receive the unexpected email from an editor.
If you never show anyone your work, the stranger who might love it cannot discover it.
If you never enter unfamiliar environments, you dramatically reduce the possibility of encountering unfamiliar opportunities.
And if Fleming had thrown away his contaminated plate without looking at it, the mould would still have appeared.
It simply wouldn’t have meant anything.
You can't control luck. But you can influence how often you encounter opportunity, how prepared you are when it appears, and what you do with it afterwards.
There is an uncomfortable truth hidden inside many stories that we describe as lucky: Before somebody could receive the fortunate break, they usually had to be somewhere the break was capable of occurring.
This is one reason people who are active, curious and willing to move beyond familiar routines can appear disproportionately lucky. Their lives contain more collisions.
They meet people outside their usual circles. They encounter ideas from unrelated fields. They try projects whose value isn’t immediately obvious. They travel, ask questions, volunteer, experiment, publish, introduce themselves and occasionally walk through doors without knowing exactly what is on the other side.
Most of those moments lead nowhere particularly remarkable.
That’s important.
If every introduction produced a business opportunity and every experiment became a breakthrough, we wouldn’t call the successful ones lucky. What makes chance powerful is precisely that we cannot know beforehand which apparently insignificant event will matter.
The conversation that changes your career may feel completely ordinary while you’re having it. The hobby that eventually becomes a business may begin as something you do on weekends without any commercial intention. The person who becomes one of the most important people in your life may initially be someone you almost didn’t meet.
We usually recognise these moments only afterwards.
The temptation is then to construct a neat story around them and pretend that somehow we knew what we were doing all along.
We didn’t.
Sometimes we simply put ourselves in the room.
There is another reason some people appear repeatedly fortunate: when something unexpected happens, they are capable of doing something with it.
This is where the familiar saying that ‘luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity‘ contains a useful insight, even if it oversimplifies what luck actually is. Preparation doesn’t create the random event, but it can profoundly affect whether the event becomes meaningful.
Imagine being unexpectedly introduced to someone who could transform your career, only to discover that you haven’t developed the skills they need. Imagine having a video suddenly reach millions of people when you have nothing else for those viewers to discover. Imagine being offered an extraordinary business opportunity without having spent the previous years acquiring the knowledge necessary to recognize whether it is actually extraordinary.
The lucky event still happened. But its value depended partly on what existed before it.
This changes the way we might think about preparation. Instead of preparing only for outcomes we can predict, there is value in becoming broadly capable enough to respond to opportunities we cannot predict at all.
Learn useful things. Become good at something. Maintain relationships. Stay curious. Build enough financial or personal flexibility that occasionally you can say yes when something unexpected appears.
Not because doing those things guarantees good fortune, but because if fortune does appear, you are less likely to watch it disappear again.
You can't control luck. But you can influence how often you encounter opportunity, how prepared you are when it appears, and what you do with it afterwards.
Any serious discussion of luck also has to acknowledge the side of the subject that motivational stories often prefer to ignore.
If we are willing to credit someone with ‘creating their own luck‘ when circumstances go well, we have to be extremely careful about what that implies when circumstances go badly.
People lose businesses because markets collapse.
Careers are interrupted by events nobody could reasonably have anticipated.
A talented person can spend years developing an idea just as a technological change makes it obsolete. Someone else can produce an almost identical idea five years later when the world is ready for it and be celebrated as a visionary.
Two people can make equally sensible decisions and receive radically different outcomes.
That matters because the belief that everybody manufactures their own fortune can quietly become a moral judgement. Success begins to look like evidence of intelligence and virtue, while failure becomes evidence that someone simply didn’t work hard enough, think positively enough, network aggressively enough or ‘create enough opportunities.‘
Life is considerably less fair than that.
Acknowledging bad luck isn’t pessimism, and it doesn’t require surrendering responsibility for the things we can control. It simply prevents us from pretending that outcomes are perfect measurements of character.
Sometimes someone made a poor decision. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes the storm simply arrived.
Read almost any biography of a highly successful person and you will encounter a beautifully coherent sequence of events. One decision leads to another, the early failures become useful lessons, an apparently insignificant meeting foreshadows a future partnership, and eventually everything converges on the achievement for which the person became famous.
Life is experienced forwards, whilst biographies are written backwards.
The person living through those events didn’t know which failures would later become useful, which relationships would matter, which experiments would work or which apparently sensible decisions would eventually lead nowhere.
Thousands of other people may have taken similarly intelligent risks without receiving the same result, but their stories are far less likely to become bestselling biographies. This is survivorship bias at work.
We study the people who reached the destination and then search their journeys for instructions, while paying considerably less attention to all the people who followed similar instructions and arrived somewhere else.
That doesn’t mean there is nothing to learn from successful people. There often is.
It means we should be careful about confusing a possible explanation for success with a guaranteed formula for producing it.
The founder who says persistence created their success may be completely sincere. Persistence probably did matter. What they cannot know is how many equally persistent founders were building equally promising businesses at the same time and never encountered the investor, customer, technological shift or fortunate timing that helped their own company survive.
This is one of the reasons NoRuleBook should be suspicious whenever somebody claims to have discovered the formula for success.
There are principles worth learning. There are strategies worth trying. There are decisions that improve probabilities. But there is no formula that removes chance from life.
Instead of asking whether you are a lucky or unlucky person, try looking at your life through a different lens.
Think about an area where you would like something to change—a career, business, creative project, relationship, skill or personal ambition—and separate the situation into two categories: the things you genuinely cannot control and the things that might increase the probability of something useful happening.
You cannot control whether somebody offers you an opportunity, but you may be able to meet more people who operate in that world.
You cannot control whether an idea succeeds, but you may be able to test more ideas.
You cannot control which piece of work unexpectedly attracts attention, but you can create and publish more work.
You cannot control whether a chance encounter changes your life, but you can decide whether your life contains enough new places, people and experiences for chance encounters to happen.
Then ask another question that is often overlooked: If an unusually good opportunity appeared tomorrow, would you actually be ready to use it?
Perhaps the answer is yes.
Perhaps the more useful work is not searching for luck at all, but developing the skill, knowledge, courage, financial flexibility or experience that would allow you to recognise and use an opportunity if one appeared.
This isn’t about controlling randomness. It’s about improving what happens on either side of it.
So, is luck real?
Absolutely.
It would be difficult to look honestly at human life and conclude otherwise. Chance influences where we begin, whom we encounter, what happens around us and occasionally whether years of work receive the opportunity they need to become visible. But accepting the existence of luck doesn’t require us to sit around waiting for it.
There is a considerable difference between saying “I cannot control everything that happens to me” and saying “There is nothing I can influence.”
We can become more curious. We can enter more rooms. We can meet people outside our existing circles, try things whose outcomes aren’t guaranteed, expose our ideas to the world and develop abilities before we know precisely where they will be useful. We can recognise that some doors opened because we earned the opportunity while others opened partly because we happened to be standing nearby at the right moment.
And when things go well, we can have enough humility to acknowledge the role fortune may have played without pretending that doing so somehow erases the work that came before it.
Over the next week, pay attention to the places where chance is currently capable of entering your life.
Not imaginary lottery-ticket luck, but ordinary unpredictable opportunity: a conversation with someone outside your usual circle, an idea you haven’t explored, a project you’ve considered sharing publicly, an invitation you would normally decline, a person whose work interests you but whom you’ve never contacted, or an environment you’ve never entered because you couldn’t see an immediate reason to be there.
Choose one small way to increase that exposure.
Then look in the opposite direction and ask what would happen if something unexpectedly good arrived tomorrow. Would you have the skill to use it, the confidence to respond, the flexibility to pursue it or the awareness to recognize it?
You don’t need to predict where your next opportunity will come from. In fact, if you could predict it, it probably wouldn’t be luck.
The point is to stop treating fortune as either a magical force that chooses certain people or an illusion that successful people have somehow overcome. Luck is part of life. Your job isn’t to control it, but to give it more opportunities to find you—and to be ready when it does.
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