Luck Is A Nasty Lie

Luck is a nasty lie.

A great tragedy of youth is the pervasiveness of luck.

It’s taught at a young age and persists into adulthood. It festers in fitness culture and eats the willpower of many who crave its quick satisfaction.

Whether we taste it or not, we’re constantly forced to eat awe and wonder at the spectacular fortune of others. It’s embodied in jealousy and regret, and it’s happily accepted as some mystical alignment of the universe to favor someone else.

Their physique, status, or accomplishments.

The places they’ve been, the dragons they’ve slayed, the company they entertain.

And while there are men and women worthy of fortune and fame, glory and admiration, their living success does not entitle you and I to jealousy and regret, and we don’t have to accept the pleasure of calling them lucky.

And it is pleasurable to accept luck as the architect of another’s success.

When we assign luck to success, when we seek an explanation we can fathom, we opt out of hard fucking work.

Because that’s what anything worthwhile demands.

Hard fucking work.

Hard fucking work, and the unfathomable.

There isn’t a breath of luck inside a months long training program, a stroke of fortune at your local CrossFit box, or an entitled expectance of glory wherever jiu jitsu is trained closest to you.

Where hard fucking work is the standard, patience is deployed at the only means of success. Because if you work hard for one day, one week, or one month, you didn’t work hard.

Ask any Warrior what their physique, status, or accomplishments required. Ask them how they went there, how they slayed that dragon, how they keep such company.

For many, their response will be unfathomable.

Onlookers will want to label their feats as luck, or fortune.

Not us.

Not you and me.

I don’t want to opt out of hard fucking work. I don’t want to accept the pleasure of calling someone else lucky. I want to see their eyes, hear their breath, and watch their posture in the face of challenge, staring down adversity. I want to experience their patience, anxiety swelling in my own chest as I imagine their prolonged effort, discomfort, focus. I want to witness the unfathomable and make it my path.

I don’t want luck.

It’s a nasty fucking lie.

Leave it for the dull and mediocre, the average, the souls who crave minimum effort. They sign their names, each morning, to a ledger of regret. They sell their health to comfort, never knowing what lives in the heart of every human being.

And what lives in the heart of every human being?

It’s the words inhaled and exhaled by the few, written on gym walls, hanging on posters and flags.

It’s a mentality, a permanent focus of the will and spirit.

It’s the blood in the veins of achievement.

It’s patience: it’s the eyes, breath, and posture in the face of challenge.

It has nothing to do with luck.

It’s “Never Fucking Quit.”