Luck = Preparation for opportunity

About 8 years back, when I used to be unhappy in my job for lack of serious work, one of my colleagues, who was 8 years senior to me, used to tell me that one should always work towards sharpening one's claws so that when opportunity strikes, you are ready to attack. 

In these 8 years, I have firmly come to believe in that statement and in fact I now see luck as just a convenient name for "preparation for opportunity". Convenient because when we feel we have been lacking "luck" in something, it really means the inconvenient truth that we lacked preparation for opportunity. So, to avoid inconvenient thought, we attribute it to luck or lack-of-luck.

Now, the question is what is preparation for opportunity? Before I go into that, let me rephrase couple of proverbs I learnt while in school :
- God helps those who help themselves
- So shall you sow, so shall you reap

The problem is, the education system just makes students remember these quotes and to some extent learn the meaning as well. However, the real meaning of these quotes is ingrained in how real life works. 

Reaping success or finding luck (God's help) are not straight-forward things. As explained in these 2 quotes, it requires a solid background of preparation in the form of "sowing effort" or "helping yourself". Going further, it is even more difficult to figure out where to put your effort to achieve a certain success and sometimes the thought itself is discouraging for many to even attempt for higher success. The key to solve this problem is that, learn there is no shortcut and so just keep spending effort!! Long ago, I read somewhere that success is not defined by where you reach, but by the difference between from where you started and where you reached.

So, achieving success or excellence or "luck" is not an event, it is a process with two parts - preparation-for-opportunity and striking-opportunity and both of them leading to one-another throughout the process. It is something like a Fibonacci series in mathematics where any number is sum of previous two and so on, so every number is conceptually result of all previous numbers...
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,.....

And there is no end of the series, it is infinite. So is the pursuit of success or achiving luck.

Story - 2009

Another year is about to finish, giving way for a new one.
However, life is not that simple and smooth like the flow of time. It can not be measured in terms of number of months or years. The pace of life can be measured by the number and impact of the events and the incidents happening in it.

For me, for sure 2009 was an year of events - some quite big and turning points of life also.

The MBA dreams
2009 started just in quick continuation to 2008 - with most of my time spent on writing MBA applications. I submitted applications for Ross and NUS in Jan 2009. For most of the Feb, I spent time relaxing and waiting for results. Soon it became clear that there was no point waiting. I had to move on and decide what next.
The whole MBA app process had taught me that my profile is not yet suited for a globally reputed MBA course. So I thought of spending my time not just on thinking how to do MBA but also do things that I like to do.

AID and the maths kit
I was getting more and more responsibilities in office and enjoyed my work. Apart from that I wanted to spend my extra time on something creative. I talked to a colleague (Mr SD) of mine who is very active in social work to get involved in some activities with him. One of my friends (NP) is working under SD in same project. He also talked to SD regarding the social work. SD asked us to join AID - association for India's development.
NP also pulled in his roomie TB who brought in his friend NS too.
So, we four, along with SD, started working on a mathematical kit for primary classes students. It was a very ambitious project.

--- below was written in 2013

Marriage
2009 ended with my marriage to Pooja Gupta and an awesome trip to Andaman & Nikobar islands.