You’re creativity is stuck, but after a week long hiatus, you finally manage to get yourself together again and decide to get up and paint that painting you decided you’d do long ago. And as luck would have it, you ran out of paint thinner. Another sign from the universe, that you just weren’t cut out to be a painter, right? Wrong!

Luck is a fantastic concept but nothing more. It provides a name for everything that we cannot control; in the old times it was luck that guided people on their journeys, because they had no means to be in control of where they were going when crossing long distances in foreign lands. Now, it’s Google Maps. 

If before it was luck that kept you from being eaten by a tiger or a pack of wolves, we now have houses and cities to protect us. And for almost everyone of us, the fact that we haven’t been eaten by a wild beast has nothing to do with luck. It’s a numbers game and the odds are stacked heavily in our favour.

For me, luck isn’t some power, that is bestowed upon some and denied to others, it’s a combination of internal and external forces: our outwards directed courage and knowledge and the internally residing responsibility and gratitude. 

The courage to believe you can and the knowledge to understand how you will be able to do it are the driving force to any endeavour; it’s not enough for us to know a lot about our craft or to produce ungodly amounts of badly executed art. Only by making knowledgable decisions and taking wise actions can we succeeded in our endeavours.

But as far as luck is concerned, the internal forces are the ones we really have to nurture, because no matter how hard we try, we will fail at something somewhere along our way. And when that happens, we and we alone have to be accountable for all the actions we took and be grateful for everything else that was done by others that came before us; be it our parents, our society or the kid that bullied us in school for being arty twats. Good or bad, they made us who we are today.

If we want to succeed as creatives, in a society that still struggles with seeing the real value in our work, it is imperative to stop using luck as an excuse. Albeit soothing, because it takes the control we have over our lives away from us and gives it into the hands of faith, I don’t believe in luck. But I do believe in hard work, being accountable for my decisions, deep gratitude for everything that was not my decision and the courage to persevere.