Anyone can get Lucky, Not Everyone can Persevere (Day 259)

Image by Myriam Zilles from Pixabay

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Success comes to the lowly and to the poorly talented, but the special characteristics of a great person is to triumph over the disasters and panics of human life.”
Seneca, On Providence, 4.1

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​Luck and privilege sure can get someone very far, yeah? We’ve all seen people who seemingly fumble through life, relying on their unplanned, cavalier, haphazard antics to get them where they want to go. We all know those folx who never train, practice, drill, hone their skills… and yet, they still seem to get ahead in the world. 

Perseverance, however, is a quality that luck cannot bestow, as the lucky rarely have the ability to always get back up one more time than you’ve been knocked down. 

Like the other Virtues, Perseverance is something that we have to develop over time, something we have to work hard at acquiring, and something that will always be with us… even when luck has seemingly abandoned us to our fate. 

We look at people like Jeff Bezos and name him lucky. We assume that because he’s one of the  richest people on the planet that he’s lucky. What we forget is that he worked his ass off to get the opportunities that came before him. Read about his life before naming him lucky… 

… because what actually happened was that he persevered. 

(See y’all tomorrow)