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hey this is Leo for actualised dot-org and in this video we're gonna take a look at an interesting question how important is luck in becoming successful luck and success these two things a lot of times we believe go hand in hand if you read stories of people who are extraordinarily successful rich people politicians visionaries throughout history inventors stuff like that one of the things you tend to see if you read a lot of biographies one of the things you see is that some of these people had some that like extraordinary circumstances happen in life they were they were born in a very particular time in a particular country in a particular circumstance that was just very very unique and we tend to think to ourselves like well I don't have those same circumstances I'm not as lucky as some of these other people are so I can't be as successful as some of these people are and I used to fall into this trap myself too in fact when I was in college I wanted to become an aerospace engineer that's when I just started college that's that was my first major and so I was studying really hard I was really serious about it and I was a good student so for me the vision was not just an aerospace engineer but I wanted to work like on something important inside of aerospace so I thought well wouldn't be cool we're probably gonna be going to to Mars or some other planets in the solar system over the next 20 or 30 or 40 years of my lifetime so I thought that would be cool to participate in that so I want to be someone who's working on that kind of project and even though I had this vision one of the immediate thoughts that came to me is like oh but wait what are the chances that I'll actually be able to work on a project like that that seems like a pretty rare opportunity and one of the things I remember I was talking to my dad and I said well I want to work for NASA the project like going to Mars maybe build some sort of rocket ship to do that and then I said to him but like what are the chances that I'll get hired to work at NASA on this project and I told them probably like one of the thousand I mean I don't know how many engineers apply to NASA for those kinds of positions I never actually researched it but in my mind I was saying I'm probably like one in a thousand or one in a hundred but you know those are pretty bad odds why would I put all this work and effort building myself as an engineer to get all these card classes and then developing myself even further why would I do all that if I only had one in a thousand chance or one a hundred chance to work on my dream career in my dream project and so that got me a little bummed out but he told me he told me no you don't even worry about that if you want to work on that project you'll be able to make it happen and so I just kind of took him on his word and then I continued with that eventually I ended up switching out of aerospace engineering went into something else but the point here being is that I think that this is something that we all go through especially when we try to pursue our life purpose whenever you identify for yourself what that dream of yours is maybe it's starting some sort of business very ambitious maybe taking your career in some very ambitious direction you have this idea but then your mind it plays tricks on you and the first thing it says is it says that wait a minute what is the chance that this is actually gonna happen can it actually happen and if you're particularly ambitious and your life purpose is taking you into a particularly ambitious trajectory in your life you have a really big dream then this is gonna worry you this is gonna bother you and honestly if you have a dream such as becoming a millionaire or a billionaire or becoming like an astronaut the President of the United States or maybe you want to become like a best-selling author selling tens of millions of books or maybe you want to become a movie star so these kinds of positions these tend to be limited in rare positions and if you just want to become a doctor there's millions of doctors you can become a doctor pretty much no problem your guarantee that if you go and study at being a doctor you'll become a doctor not not I mean it's it's difficult work but there's like a certain guarantee in doing that whereas if you want to become an astronaut it's a little bit different because you can go and train to become an astronaut but there's literally only so many astronauts I don't know how many there are maybe 50 maybe a hundred of them at any given point there's not that many of them so what are the chances that you're actually gonna get out to fly out into space probably not that great also you know something like becoming present in the United States let's say or president of your country there's only one of those maybe throughout your entire lifetime there will be five or ten of those at most so that means that your chances are are like you got to take one of those slots and you're competing against potentially millions of people so your odds are very very low in these kinds of positions you might say the same thing of becoming a movie star or a really really successful entrepreneur to become a millionaire one of the odds of that probably like one in a million or maybe one in a hundred thousand if you just take like ordinary statistics so when you're up against these kinds of obstacles it looks grim it looks like why go out there and take on this risk it seems too risky and when I was when I was younger before I started doing personal development this always bothered me this idea of the odds the odds are always against me and in my back of my mind I would all be seeing it oh man the odds the odds are so so terrible so terrible against my success so let's take a look luck and success actually what you're going to discover if you do personal development is you're going to discover that luck is not that important to being successful and I'm gonna tell you why exactly right here luck for the average person tends to average out so I thought I think of luck as positive luck and negative luck so positive luck would be something like let's say you receive $3,000 tax refund that you didn't expect in the mail you just get a $3,000 check like man that's nice that year I got an extra three grand so that's like really good luck you're gonna tell yourself so let's say you get that you get that one year the next year usually this stuff averages out so what's gonna happen is maybe something that's gonna happen to you like a kitchen fire your kitchen gets is on fire you got some kitchen damages you didn't have to spend a thousand dollars to repair it so maybe one year you earned $1,000 or $3,000 the next year it might cost you a couple thousand dollars to repair some some damage that happened because of some accident and so I tend to believe and I like this mindset this mindset that luck averages out the positive and the negative now of course there are extraordinarily lucky people people who win lotteries and people who have like amazing stuff happened to them in their business career etc and then of course you've also got people who are extremely unlucky plus a negative luck maybe they get on to a horrible car accident maybe their house burned down maybe they got some sort of debilitating disease cancer this kind of stuff so there's no denying that of course there's these extremes but I think that you don't want to plan your life as though these extremes are gonna happen to you because honestly what happens to the average person the most likely thing that's gonna happen to you in your life is that you're probably gonna live for a good 60 or 70 years and if you're gonna die of something it's probably going to be of obesity heart disease or cancer or you know some sort of disease that happens much later in life not early in life and if you're gonna have catastrophes in your life they're gonna be minor catastrophes not major catastrophes so sure I think the average person has good luck a couple of years in their whole life like really really good luck and sometimes they have really bad luck but these are not like the most catastrophic and extreme sorts of good and bad luck and they tend to average out so I think this idea that you need to worry about luck is it you just don't need to worry about it very much is it gonna tend to average out for your whole life and so the mindset that I want you to adopt is that you're just average you're the average person they're gonna live an average life you're gonna have average luck now this might seem kind of depressing but actually this is a really positive thing because if you have average luck what does that mean that means that your success is just grounded in your work and in your effort it's not grounded in being lucky it's not grounded in going to some sort of extraordinary job interview and then happening to land that job it's not grounded in you sitting in some cafe somewhere and then some movie director accidentally spot to you and thinks that you'd be perfect for the new next blockbuster movie and then you get this amazing role just by accident by fluke luck like even though this stuff might happen it's not a good idea to plan for it's bad strategy basically if you're gonna be planning for a military campaign let's say in fighting a major war it would be reckless of the general who's leading that campaign to say well you know what we're just gonna expect really good luck on the battlefield or also it wouldn't be very prudent for him to say well what if everything goes horribly wrong and horribly against us and then plan his strategy based on the worst possible odds it would be bad in both cases he'd want to kind of go down the middle of the road anticipating that he'd have average luck on the battlefield and so he's gonna plan according to average luck and then if if that doesn't go his way then he'll he'll kind of adapt on the fly so that's what I want you to assume here and the nice thing about this is that this forces you to adopt this mastery mindset the mastery mindset is that you can really work to master something in your life and this has been shown by lots of research that they've done on all the really successful people alive most successful people they don't get successful by luck by accident people like Mozart and Tiger Woods and the best Hollywood actors that you know and the most successful business people like Steve Jobs and and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett like these types of people they're not just lucky and you might say well but what about Bill Gates Bill Gates was born in a very particular time in history right at this perfect time where by the time he was growing up he had all this experience with computers and he was able to start Microsoft just at that perfect window of opportunity where you could still create an operating system that could become a monopoly that's basically the manasa what Microsoft is now it's a monopoly on operating systems and you can't just go and start a new operating system nowadays to be very difficult because the market is totally overcrowded and when I read business books when I was younger this one of the things that worried me is I was thinking myself but like all these amazing business people it seems like they all capitalized on these very rare opportunities that no longer exist for me nowadays I can't create a new operating system it doesn't work nowadays I can't create a new Google it wouldn't work because that market is saturated so what am I to do how am I going to make my success the thing here is that it's not just that these people who are lucky yes these people had opportunities that they really seized on and they made the most of them and I'm going to talk about that later in the video it's about seizing on opportunities I think that's really important when you seize an opportunity it makes it look as though you were extraordinary lucky but that's not really the case you prepared for it so all these amazing people that I talked about and and anyone else that you can bring to mind it's not that they just fell into it they don't fall into success they work really really hard and then they capitalize on those opportunities and that's the opportunity here for you is to do that by committing to investing lots of lots of time and effort in training yourself to become really really skilled in something that's what life purpose for me is about it's about finding that one thing that you're going to spend 10,000 hours twenty thousand hours of your life doing because as you do that you become so proficient so expert at it that luck tends to come your way it tends to draw it in you become more capable than anyone else around you to seize on those amazing opportunities and that's what you're going to find with people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs and amazing musicians and composers and movie stars is that yes they might have had those amazing opportunities but really they worked hard on themselves in order to seize those opportunities and they didn't just do it once but they did it repeatedly right otherwise they kind of become a one-hit wonder and then we hear that one amazing song or that one amazing business but then we forget about that person the people that we really remember aren't the one-hit wonders they're the really consistent geniuses in their field and the way to do that is not through luck that's through hardcore practice and adopting this mastery mindset there is something to be said about the fact that there are certain situations and scenarios in life that aren't really suited to this so for example winning the lottery or winning a giant poker tournament or going on a contest like American Idol and being the one out of all the millions of people that compete there from the very beginning of this ages all the way up to the to the very to the very end to be like one of the million person that wins American Idol or some other kind of rare position like this see putting yourself in those situations you got to be smart about that you don't want to do that I see that a lot of people are like eager to jump on board with that so there's a difference between something I call one Avenue versus a million avenues so for example with American Idol if your dream is to become successful and to become recognized through American Idol that's like one Avenue right you've got only one way to succeed at that so you've got this amazing ambitious goal and you might say well that's my dream goal that's my passion and so I would say go follow your passion but then what happens is that you go follow your passion then you fail catastrophically because the problem is that yes you have this passion and that's the good part but you were foolish and naive in the way you pursued it basically you chose a passion that can only be achieved and arrived at through one Avenue that limits your chances so see passion alone isn't enough to make you succeed you have to also be strategic and smart about how you kind of position and pursue that passion the ledge s'matter here so what's the alternative to the one path well the alternative to the one path is to have a goal that has many paths the more paths the better because that allows you to kind of skirt obstacles as they inevitably come up so for example if you just set the goal for yourself to become a millionaire now even though the odds of becoming a millionaire maybe one in a hundred thousand or one on a million it doesn't really matter because you can easily easily beat those odds with the term the determination you're going to put forward and also because becoming a millionaire that's a million paths strategy there's a million avenues for becoming a millionaire literally there's a million different types of businesses you could start there's probably even hundreds of ways of becoming a millionaire even within one particular niche in the market so let's say you wanted to become a millionaire in the fast food industry well there's probably at least a hundred different ways that you can do that and that's what you want you want the opportunities you want the avenues there's not just one way something where there's only one way that's really really limiting you and setting you up for long term failure so try to avoid out of your life if you have a big dream make sure that there's plenty of different ways you can go about it and don't be so narrow-minded that you have these blinders on your and you say yourself well I want this dream here and I want it this way my way and no other way because what that does is that limits you it limits your creativity and also one of the things you notice about some of these most successful people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and stuff these people they themselves couldn't exactly predict if you asked them at the beginning of their careers they couldn't tell you how they're gonna get to where they want to get to okay Steve Jobs when he started he didn't know that he was going to be making iPhones or iPads like there's no way he could have conceived that 30 years ago and when Bill Gates started he didn't know that he would be running this billion-dollar company that had a monopoly on operating systems he just knew that he went into computers and then something started coming out of that because he was able to improvise and work on the fly and also he wasn't like dead-set on just making one thing work he would have been comfortable with anything working within that you know within that area of that domain that he wanted to master in business so this is what tends to happen is that you don't always know where life will take you and you have to be willing to adapt and be flexible in your approach that doesn't mean that you don't have a really ambitious goal you can't have a very ambitious goal just be open to other possibilities and in fact a lot of times what happens is that this isn't a bad thing this is a good thing because you might have one ambitious goal and then as you're pursuing you might say well maybe this thing is going to fail it's not going to work but then you see even a more ambitious goal then you go for that and you end up even better than you originally planned but at the beginning you could never foresee that that new thing would open up for you and this is especially true for example in business is especially true if you're doing something on the cutting edge so if you're on the cutting edge of art if you're on the cutting edge of music if you're not on the cutting edge of technology in business then you just like can't foresee this stuff and you have to be comfortable with being uncertain and still going forward and still being passion about this there's this mindset difference that I see between successful people and unsuccessful people really successful people they are creators less successful people are competitors competitors put themselves in these kind of scenarios in life where they have to compete other people in order to win so for example perfect example this is American Idol American Idol is all about competition that means that you can't really create much within American Idol sure you're creating let's say your song and you're creating your dance moves and you're creating the way that you're you're singing it in your style yes that's the creative part but in the end yes you're creating all that stuff but then your creativity has to go head-to-head with somebody else's creativity and only one of you is gonna win just because of the artificial way in that in the in which this contest is kind of designed so when you put yourself in that kind of scenario where only one person will win out of hundreds or millions then like you're setting you're really limiting your art whereas if you just for example go into business for yourself and you're open about the different possibilities of your business maybe you're even open to going into one industry than switching industries when you see that there's something better out there than this original industry that you started with in that scenario it's not this win-lose situation you're not necessarily competing and now you might say but leo in business there's a lot of competition and that's true businesses do compete but it's not the same kind of rigged contest scenario which is much more limited like American Idol because in the end in business you can actually create so much value you can create a new brand you can create a new technology which isn't necessarily gonna steal business from other people it can it can actually create new customers it create new entire markets and industries and so there's like the pie isn't limited it's not like you're just taking one piece of the pie you're growing the pie and that's the difference between this creator and competitor mindset I think that's very important not to be a creator in life because when you make yourself a creator that makes you very anxious and makes you very stressed all the time because you're constantly looking over your shoulder and I I encountered this problem with my first business I was in a business where I wasn't able to be a creator I had to compete because we were competing for live literally limited slots on on search engines so our business was trying to rank websites really high on search engines through internet marketing now when you're doing that there's only so many positions on the search result pages on Google for example so there's only ten slots on the first page and really the top three slots are the most important so if you don't hit those one of those top three slots on a Google page who ever which everybody is of course trying to hit all your competitors then you're not gonna be making any money you're not gonna be successful so this stressed me a lot because I felt like I was competing against everybody else and I wasn't just able to focus on creating the stuff that I wanted which is very different than what I'm doing right now what I'm doing right now I don't feel like I have to compete so much there's still an element of competition there's other people on YouTube who are making self-help videos there's a million self-help authors out there so I'm going to gets them to some extent but it's not the same because I feel like I'm kind of growing the pie with my videos with my business and it's much like it's much more satisfying less stressful because I know that I can actually kind of grow a new niche a new industry like grow new customers just through my passion through my style that wouldn't have existed otherwise and that's how you have to try and position yourself so I think this is a good discussion a good discussion if you really want to start to pursue your life purpose you're not really sure how you're afraid to do it and you have some of these limiting beliefs this is one of the limiting beliefs that I have this thing between luck this difference between luck and success and my ultimate message here is just that you want to really take ownership here stop giving your power away to other people other businesses your employers because the strategy that I pursue nowadays in my life is trying to remove as much randomness as I can I don't want a strategy for my life where I'm relying on luck that's why I don't think care about things like lottery I don't care about things like gambling I don't really care about going into business right to compete head-to-head really hard with somebody I don't care about entering some sort of contest where I'm gonna get a bunch of freebies if I win because this stuck to me it's just like noise it's so much better to just focus on creating the thing that you want being really certain about what you're going for and then just give it your all I think that that's your best chance of success and you know what along that way what's gonna happens you're gonna see opportunities as you're working really hard on yourself to create this amazing thing that's independent of any opportunities that come you're just working on it that's great now an opportunity comes by let's say a couple of years later you're on you're on this narrow road you see this amazing opportunity you can ask yourself do I want to seize it is it a good opportunity when you see it it's a great opportunity you have the skills because you've been working so hard on this business that you're trying to master you've got the skills so now you could tap into this opportunity and maybe it's gonna be good maybe it's gonna fail if it fails you can get back on track if it doesn't then you're on on your path to success now your track might shift a little bit but you're still going going ahead and you're still being creative and so I think that this is ultimately the the approach that you want to take with your success and what you're gonna find I think it's really amazing when you buckle down and you work on improving yourself building up your inner resources doing personal development also working on mastering your career or whatever business you're in when you're doing that opportunities almost magically that thing that they say about Law of Attraction just stuff like starts coming to you when you're really focused and you know what you want in life well that's very true and I don't think that this is some sort of magical superstitious kind of thing it's just simply that when you're very prepared you're able to see opportunities and seize opportunities opportunities are around us everywhere despite what it might seem I know when I started with my business I thought man like there's so little opportunities nowadays compared to what there was before but actually that's not true at all that's a limiting belief it's just that you have to have a certain lens that you're looking through to spot the opportunities once you get the right lenses in your own mind we're talking about beliefs and mindsets once you get those correct lenses and part of that comes with doing lots of training and knowing exactly what you want very long-term in your life then you start to see all the little opportunities that are everywhere and in fact what's gonna happen there's gonna be way more opportunities that you have then you have time to seize so you're gonna be left with a quality problem which is cherry picking the best of the best of the best of those opportunities and only taking that one or two opportunities per year and really seizing on it and that's a really great position to be in in life so that's my message to you train yourself hard don't worry about luck and opportunities will come and you can be successful even when the odds are really really against you because even though your chances are becoming a millionaire might be one enough in a million that's not actually the case when you put hard work into your goal just because you set the mission of becoming a millionaire already that puts you in the top 1% of all the people that are out there because the average person has never set that vision for himself not seriously they just wish about it they wish about being written about being rich but they're not really serious and determined about it so just by setting that intention already you're in the top 1% and then if you go and you pick a particular industry where you want to start a business and you start finding business mentors reading business books you start playing around and tinkering and starting your own little businesses that already puts you in the next one percent of the one percent that you're already in so already you're cutting out another 99 out of a hundred people by doing that and so as you go and you invest more and more and more time and effort and intelligence and so what you're doing with your business the odds all the sudden they really really improve in your favor and the more and more you work the better the better the odds get and by that point it's no matter luck it's all about the effort that you've put in and every successful person even though they acknowledge all the amazing opportunities and amazing people that came along in their life in the back of their mind I think they also are very proud about how much effort they put forward because when you do something like that like you start an amazing business or you just like kick ass in your career what you discover is that man like I have to work so hard to make it happen there's no luck involved it's really really hard work every day I have to get up and I have to struggle struggle struggle stay very very focused on my objectives and when I do that I see that success comes to me and when I don't do that I fall off track I see that no amount of luck can ever help me so when you finally do achieve that amazing objective of yours and you reach those dreams you're gonna feel really good inside because it wasn't by sheer luck that you did it you did it by all the preparation and hard work alright this is Leo I'm signing off go ahead and post me your comments down below like this video to click the like button for me if you liked it and also throw it on Facebook share with a buddy with a friend so that these Oh spread around and finally come and sign up to my newsletter actualize other one right here it's a free newsletter I release new videos every week I've lots of cool exclusive content that I have planned and then among in the months ahead so make sure you sign up for that the reason you want to do that is because I'm really excited and passionate about giving you the mindsets you need to master your life just like the mindset we talked about here you know success versus luck how important is it what are the little nuances that you need to know in order to overcome these doubts that you have in yourself that's what I find is that the fears and the doubts that we have our mindsets hold us back the most from creating that extraordinary life that we want whether it's with career business finances relationships all that stuff so for me finding these mindsets and really understanding them is so fascinating and I think that they'll provide a huge value to you because when I started learning these mindset they really changed the success that I was getting in my life and I'm positive that they'll do the same for you so sign up and you'll be all set for that you