Luck

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Recently, I was recounting to my sisters lucky incidents that happened to our family. For me, I brought up the example of how I got the scholarship to ANU:

The only way I could study overseas was to get a scholarship that must at least cover tuition fee. Hence, I was scouting for university that had Actuarial Science course and offered scholarship. In Australia, at that time, I only knew Macquarie University and University of Melbourne offered the course but neither offered scholarships, at least not to oversease students.

A schoolmate, who was also interested in Actuarial Science, asked me whether I want to go together with her to the Australia Education fair. I declined because of the reason I gave above. Later, after she had already gone to the fair, she told me that ANU offered the course and also scholarship that we could apply.

I was luckly on 4 fronts in this instance: ANU had the course I wanted, they offered scholarship, a schoolmate went to the fair specifically looking for the course and then told me about her finding, knowing that I was looking for that. Lucky, right?

A sudden thought struck me during this retelling to my sister: we also create our own luck. I never truly understand what that phrase means but I choose to rephrase it as "we create the opportunity for luck to happen to us". In this instance, if I had been a jerk, that schoolmate wouldn't have had alerted me the opportunity. If I hadn't had good study ethics, I wouldn't had the academic results that would then let me consider Actuarial Science and so the schoolmate wouldn't approach me.

This is enlightening to me.

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