“Good luck!”

We’ve all heard it once before. That pesky luck that can either make or break your life. It all seems to come down to whether you have it or not, or if you have enough of it. Especially in sports, how much luck you have usually is an internal egotistical factor that ultimately predetermines for you whether or not you will achieve a short or long term goal. Terms usually associated with luck are based on wishful thinking and often do not provide any soothing of nerves, only triggering them worse. This is only because the question of whether or not luck is real is constantly around us, and so many people rely on luck on a daily basis, whether it is for a sports based reason, a test in school you didn’t study for or even the luck associated with asking your parents to hang out with friends (and praying they say yes). 

I know in my personal experience how daunting it can be trying to figure out whether or not you have the correct “circumstances’ or “capabilities” to receive that luck. For example, as a swimmer, before a race I will often break down everything I do for my pre-race routine and think deeply about anything I could’ve done to cause myself a misfortune in luck. Did I warm up enough? Did I tell the other athlete “good luck”? Did I do my pre-race nerve routine? Did I roll out this morning? Am I wearing the right goggles? Cap? Suit? It can even go down to the smallest details like if I’m wearing mascara or not, in relation to if I am being too cocky or not. So many factors of my pre race nerves come from the unknown reality of luck. Nobody knows if they have it, or if they have enough of it to accomplish their goals. I will never know if I have enough luck to get my olympic trials cut, and I didn’t know if I would even be lucky enough to win two state titles.

However, I still do believe luck is real. But not in the way that we categorize it. Firstly, although I am a big contradiction to this statement, I do not think that luck should be a factor that affects athletes in any way. Sports are almost always solely dependent on whether or not you, the athlete, have put in enough work. Sometimes, it’s a team effort depending on what sport you play (volleyball, basketball, etc.). Additionally, when it comes to college recruiting or individual sports, luck is not a factor that plays into how well you do. It is all of the work you put into the sport and all the time you put into it that will reflect your performance. Same goes for tests in school: the amount of time and studying you do to prepare for that AP Calculus test is one of the biggest determining factors of your preceding grade. Luck is purely a mental aspect of our lives. 

There’s different ways that luck might be played into our lives on a level that we cannot control. One big example being the fact that you never really know for sure about all the factors associated with different parts of your life. It seems very vague, but let me explain. Let’s say that I did everything I could do to prepare for a specific race, and I did all of my “pre-race” nervous breakdown routines perfectly, but another athlete in my finals heat took four pre-workout scoops and was doped with an enhancing drug. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is bad luck. It is out of my control. Same goes for preparing extra hard for a test with the knowledge of what you thought would be on the test, and then something you know for a fact you weren’t taught shows up on the test. This is an example of bad luck, and a type of luck that you have to just trust you will have. It lies in trust. Another example could be getting cheated on, or trusting the wrong person. All of these experiences added up are life lessons, and the more you have, the more luck you gain. 

You see, some might disagree with me, but I do not think luck is just something that you have or don’t have. It’s completely circumstantial and dependent on YOU and what you do to achieve, accomplish or stray away from (specifically). There might be occasional “miracles” or times where something unexpected occurs, but everything that is meant to happen will almost always happen, regardless of how much luck you have or not.