Put Yourself in a Position to be Lucky

Harvey Spevak is the CEO of Equinox Holdings, a fitness company. He has some very interesting advice on staying healthy so you can perform at your best.

• Exercise in the morning. It energizes you and prevents the day from getting away from you and not exercising at all.
• Sleep is crucial. Get at least eight hours of sleep a night.
• You gain weight in the winter because your metabolism slows down. So streamline your diet.

But in this post I want to discus his three best life and career success lessons.

• The more challenging it is, the more interesting.
• Put yourself in a position to be lucky.
• Follow your passion in all that you do. It’s more fulfilling – and how you yield greater success.

Good advice. I particularly like Harvey’s second point – put yourself in a position to be lucky.

Here’s a story that illustrates that point. I have a friend who lost his job a couple of years ago. It was mid-December, right before the holidays, not a great time to be looking for work. As it turns out, he was “lucky.” He found a job quickly, making more than he did at the job he lost. And he started work the second week in January.

I put lucky in quotes in the sentence above because my friend was lucky in that he was able to find a good job so quickly. Here’s the rest of the story…

My friend has a large network. He stays in touch with his contacts. As things turned out, one of his contacts helped him find his new job. He and she email three or four times a year and see one another for dinner at holiday time. He and she had dinner the day he lost his job. He could have begged off – he had just been through a traumatic experience. But he didn’t. He showed up.

Two days after their dinner, my friend got a call from his friend. One of her clients was looking for a VP of Operations. My friend is an Operations guy. She introduced him to the CEO of her client company. They hit it off and he got the job.

Pretty lucky, right? Maybe so, but my friend made his own luck by putting himself in a position to be lucky. He maintained contacts with his network. He chose to honor a dinner engagement when he could have stayed home and sulked.

Staying in touch with your network is only one way of putting yourself in a position to be lucky. Volunteering for tough assignments is another. Paying it forward is another. The idea here is that you want to become known as a nice person, a solid performer, a giver. Do these things and you’ll put yourself in a position to be lucky. And we all can use a little bit of luck every once in a while.

Your career mentor,

Bud