You Need to Create Your Own Luck

My advice for people who are in high school and college or graduating college is the same.  Find out what you love.  What you love in your heart more than anything else and do that.   You can make a career out of anything — out of toys, video games, even space flight.  So at the end of the day, doing something significant in life is hard.  It takes extraordinary commitment.  

You hear stories about people lucking out, that’s the minority.  A lot of the great successes in life were overnight successes after 10 years of hard work.  And most people you know, find out that to do something great in life is extraordinarily hard and you’re going to be told , no, time after time and you’re going to fail time after time and unless you really love what you do, you’re going to give up before you succeed.  

So ultimately, if you can find in your heart of hearts what you will do anyway because it is your mission on this planet, it’s fun it’s play, then you will do that better than anybody else and you will do it at 3:00 a.m. or 4:00 a.m., when everybody’s exhausted and you will succeed because in your heart, it’s what you are meant to do.  And people will see that.  And when they see that, they will want to support your.  

So the first, second, fourth, fifth thing you have to do is really tap into your soul and find out what you want to do on this planet and then go do that with such passion.  I know Joseph Campbell said it the best.  You know, do that with so much passion as a man whose hair is on fire, seek water.  So, that’s my advice. 

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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