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I got lucky as a claims adjuster—and in life —and you can too!
I made a friend while away from home, working a storm for an extended period.
We were weeks into our friendship when my wife came for a visit. She cooked a couple of meals for us and then a couple more for us to eat after she was gone home. (She is a good cook and extremely easy on the eyes, and way too nice to be affiliated with me, or some claim.)
My friend said, “You lucky dog.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it. I met her when we were still in our teens. She was easily the best catch on campus, and to increase the odds against me, I was on a different campus in a different school. While the silly boys at her school stumbled over themselves, I boldly swept in and swept her away. I made my own luck.”
Some years later, a former colleague congratulated me on my promotion to the presidency of Adjust U. He was shocked and considered my rise meteoric because he didn’t know the journey. He called me an “overnight success.”
Overnight success! I was fifty-eight years old! If he had seen me as a senior pastor at age 23, which I was, he might have used that description and been accurate.
At 58, nothing happens overnight.
He asked me, “How did you luck into that?”
Many people share a similar mindset. They explain to themselves and others that “luck” is the only difference between their lack of achievement or advancement versus someone who seems to have gotten further along
Such lucky dogs, those people!
The Roman philosopher Seneca, a significant influencer in the school of Stoicism, is reported to have said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
The cold fact is that all people are not created equal in terms of privilege, advantage, physical attractiveness, IQ, or any other way. For some, life is a sprint from the fast lane. For others, it is a cross-country marathon over rugged terrain. When you start behind, poorly equipped, you have to run harder and with more endurance than when you get out of the blocks early and well-equipped.
The question remains: “How did you luck into that?”
To answer the question, I offer you my…
🍀Seven Laws for Getting Lucky 🍀
Law #1: To accomplish anything, you must do something. 🚀
In the Age of Entitlement, something for nothing is the order of the day.
Political candidates campaign on “fair share” promises of something for nothing. “Give me your vote, and I will get you a piece of the pie you never baked.”
Kids are handed life on a silver platter by parents determined to make sure “they have it better than I did” and then complain about the platter.
Students turn to AI for grades they didn’t earn in lessons they never learned.
Nothing about entitlement is satisfying. Grants leave you feeling empty. Hard-won victories and hard-earned money will always be more rewarding, more cherished, and better preserved.
Law #2: Take calculated risks. 🎲
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
You can’t get anywhere by going nowhere. But to get somewhere you want to be, you must leave the comfort of where you are. And where you are may be the result of where you once believed you wanted to be.
But now you want more because enough never really is.
Reward is relative to the risk taken. Be bold enough to be thought stupid by the timid. But don’t be stupid.
Law #3: Know everything about one thing and as much as you can about everything. 🧠
Focus is key, but context is king.
Consider Steve Jobs.
His deep expertise was in computer design. But his ‘lucky’ break came from a random calligraphy class he took years earlier. He dropped out of Reed College and began dropping in on classes that interested him. One of them was Calligraphy. He learned about Serif and San Serif and such. That broad knowledge of typography, when applied to his core focus, gave the world the first personal computer.
Your next big break might not come from another industry report, but from a history podcast, a pottery class, or a conversation with someone in a completely different field.
Think about Billy Beane and the Moneyball revolution.
The A’s front office knew baseball inside and out—just like all the other front offices. The problem was their budget. How does a small-budget team in a second-rate baseball town compete with the deep pockets of the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers?
Well, you look at Wall Street and Sabermetrics. You do the world’s first deep dive into analytics and change your approach to talent evaluation and game management entirely, and, voila, you become competitive and threaten baseball royalty. Now, everybody in every sport is at least partially guided by analytics.
My journey is relevant here.
One of the things I am most proud of is that I have learned everything I can about a few things, like leadership and communication, the core competencies that define my role, but I have tried to learn something about everything I can.
I am working on a book about writing and in the Introduction of it, I explain to the reader why I should be heard on the matter, who I am as a writer. To do that, I took a few hours to dig through old files. I dug up things I had written for publication. Some landed in national publications, and a handful in international publications.
The thing is, I have written “professionally” on broad and disconnected subjects. Theology? Check. Ministry? Check. Christian living? Church-building? Check. Family matters? Check. The NFL? Check. The Dallas Cowboys? Check. Politics? Check. Hernias? Yep. The Stock Market? You bet. Web copy for startups? Sure. The FOREX Market? That, too.
These are a few of the topics I have learned well enough to form an opinion on and get paid to write about.
But here I am, leading a school I founded for insurance adjusters, breaking ground in the world of independent adjusting firms. This has nothing to do with the Dallas Cowboys or hernias.
Or does it?
Law #4: Embrace failure because it isn’t. 💪
I would like to just pause here a moment and quote one of the greatest quote machines in history, and a world-class world leader, Winston Churchill:
Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
If you are going through Hell, keep going.
What about Jimbo?
James Dyson is a story of failure + failure + failure = success. And how!
Frustrated with his vacuum cleaner, he set out to build a better one. What followed were five years of what most would call failure. He built 5,126 prototypes that didn’t work. Think about that number. Most of us give up after three or four setbacks. Dyson didn’t see 5,126 failures; he saw 5,126 steps toward success.
Each failed prototype wasn’t an endpoint; it was a data point.
Prototype #783 taught him about optimal cyclone width.
Prototype #2,412 taught him about material durability under stress.
Prototype #4,198 taught him about acoustic dampening.
For Jim Dyson, failure’ wasn’t fatal; it was educational. He embraced failure, learned from it, and kept going. His ‘luck’ was forged in a workshop of relentless iteration. He could be the poster boy for Churchill’s quote about stumbling from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm.
Let’s talk about Stewart Butterfield and his merry band of Slackers.
The Story: In 2009, Stewart Butterfield and his team at Tiny Speck launched an online game called Glitch. They had raised millions in venture capital and worked on it for years. The game was creative and quirky, but it never gained commercial traction. In 2012, they made the painful decision to shut it down. They were colossal failures.
The “Failure” that Wasn’t: While building Glitch, the development team, which was spread across multiple cities, had created its own internal communication tool to collaborate more effectively. It was a simple, channel-based chat system that was far better than email. As they were winding down the failed game, they realized the most valuable thing they had created wasn’t the game itself, but the tool they used to build it.
They embraced the failure of their primary product and pivoted the entire company to focus on this internal tool. They called it Slack.
Slack became one of the fastest-growing business applications in history and was eventually acquired for $27.7 billion.
How ’bout them Dallas Cowboys Head Coach Jimmy Johnson and the Thanksgiving Day swing pass.
It was Thanksgiving Day 1990. We were in Lubbock, celebrating Thanksgiving with my wife’s extended family. The Cowboys game is the big event every Thanksgiving. This one was no different. The new regime led by owner Jerry Jones and head coach Jimmy Johnson was in year two. 1989 was an utter disaster but there was hope. There’s always hope!
The Cowboys were losing at halftime to the hated Redskins. In the second half, the Cowboys were beginning to show signs of life. They were mounting a comeback! Right in the middle of this nerve-wracking time, Johnson and his staff started calling for swing passes to rookie running back Emmitt Smith. The plays are getting blown up by the Redskins linebackers. No gain. Loss of yard. Short gain.
I am in the middle of complaining about the definition of insanity when yet another swing pass to Smith goes for 48 yards and a touchdown! I interrupt the lesson I am giving on doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results to scream my lungs out, cheering the genius coaching.
Law #5: Get off the Penny Machine. 🎰
I hate gambling. I do not care for casinos. The dazzling lights and constant sound of soul-sucking machines gorging on hard-earned cash do nothing much for me. Still, I have taken my wife a few times. We always go with a budget and that budget is never excessive. I let her play the machines while I smoke a cigar and wander the floor.
She likes the penny machines because she can play longer with less. (Of course, there is no such thing as a penny machine because no one plays a penny a pull.)
One time, however, many years ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we stopped at a casino in Baton Rouge because we were a few hours early for her flight. She took a $100 bill to play with. I suggested she put it in the $5 machine and try it.
“I will lose it faster.”
“Yes, but if you win, you will win bigger.”
On her last $5 pull, she won $8,000.
That happened once. And never again because the house always wins.
The point here is the penny machine is for players who just want to have a little fun and spend a little time and say they played the games.
Where the stakes are higher and the losses are bigger, the winners win big.
Remember Blockbuster vs Netflix.
For years, Blockbuster Video owned the most profitable ‘penny machine’ in town—a safe, predictable rental model.
Then came Netflix.
Instead of competing for pennies, they walked over to the high-stakes, unproven ‘$5 machine’ called ‘streaming.’ They poured their resources into a risky bet that their own safe business (DVDs-by-mail) would one day be obsolete.
While Blockbuster clung to the comfort of its proven model, afraid to lose big, Netflix understood that to win big, you have to be willing to bet big. Blockbuster played not to lose. Netflix played to win. And that decision is why you now ‘Netflix and chill’ instead of driving to a strip mall.
Law #6: Learn to Quit! 🛑
You know the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “Winners never quit and quitters never win.”
That fits well with Churchill’s pleas for his people to hang in there while they are being bombed to near extinction by the Nazi machine.
Sometimes, though, you have to quit.
Sylvester Stallone says quit!
In perhaps his most powerful speech, Stallone talked about pursuing something that didn’t work. He quit and pursued something else, something he was passionate about, committed to, and determined to succeed with.
The result was a script called Rocky.
Studios loved it but didn’t love him for the part. He would not have it any other way. They didn’t like the way he slurred his speech and didn’t think he fit the mold. But it was his story, and they weren’t getting it without him playing Rocky Balboa. They caved. He won.
The rest is the kind of cinematic history you cannot make up.
Howard Schultz quit Starbucks first.
This idea of strategic quitting isn’t just for movie heroes; it’s a fundamental law of business visionaries. Consider Howard Schultz. He had a great job at a successful company called Starbucks, a local bean seller. But he had a bigger vision for what it could be—a vision his bosses rejected. Faced with a choice between comfort and conviction, Schultz did what winners do: he quit. (Do you see my smirk?)
He left his safe job to build his own dream. His success was so undeniable that he eventually returned and bought the very company that wouldn’t listen to him. Sometimes, the only way to get your ‘Rocky’ made is to quit the studio that won’t cast you and build your own.
Law #7: Nothing is perfect. ✨
Before I knew I had seven laws, I knew I would write seven laws because the preacher in me never dies. I often wrote sermons with three main points, or seven—three because of the Trinity (the Godhead) and seven because it is the number of perfection and an important number throughout the Bible. God rested on the seventh day, and I would not rest until I could think of my seventh law, even if I didn’t really have one.
But I do! And here it is.
Nothing is perfect. Not you. Not your job. Not your dream. Not your environment. Not your wife. Not your kids. Not your grandkids. (Well, my two-year-old grandson Jaxon may be the exception here.)
Nothing! Nothing is perfect.
Not even this formula for getting lucky.
The truth is you can do all the right things and still get the wrong results.
You can be Marv Levy.
Marv Levy wasn’t perfect.
He dang sure wasn’t perfect. For one thing, he cussed. For another, he is forgotten by most because of the games he didn’t win.
But Levy was a Hell of a coach! He coached his Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls. No one before him and no one since can say that. He also lost all four—two of them to Jimmy Johnson’s Dallas Cowboys.
Bill Gates took imperfection and crammed it down the world’s throat!
Everybody liked Apple better. Windows was too buggy. People complained about the epic crashes and the blue screen of death. Still, 90% of the world’s computers run on Gates’ imperfect product because he didn’t wait until every bug was fixed. He didn’t wait for all conditions to be perfect. He built something people could use and got it out there, and now those people can’t do without it.
Conclusion🏁
An old preacher used to say, “You can get married in an orange grove and still get a lemon.”
Sometimes, you just have to get lucky. But remember this, Luck isn’t a loner. He/she is part of something bigger and often travels with hard work, innovation, tenacity, sticking with it, never giving up, and quitting.
Here’s hoping you get lucky today!
