Luck or Opportunity

張貼日期：Jun 20, 2011 8:30:12 AM

Luck or Opportunity

Tai-Jen Kuo

When a person praises another one by saying, “you did a good job!” He or she would reply, “I am just in the right place and at the right time.” In my opinion, a person’s success is not only from his luck but also the opportunity which he has seized. Luck had been arranged by God before a person came to this world. We could not anticipate what would happen to us in the future or understand why we encountered certain things before. However, opportunity is different from luck. We can not control luck, but we can create opportunity for ourselves.

Chinese people think that human beings living in this world are influenced by the conversion of the environment: heaven and earth, which also means ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ in Chinese philosophy. They recognize the interaction between ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ as a kind of destiny. I think it is quite reasonable. There are some instances which can respond to the concept of yin yang. For example, recently, a big earthquake attacked Japan, triggering off a serious tsunami. Many towns along the coast were destroyed. Also a nuclear power plant was broken, and the radiation was severely casted out. In addition, there are many countries attacked by earthquakes these years, such as, Haiti, Sichuan, Indonesia, etc. Furthermore, our country is also in the victim list. Typhoon Morakot brought Taiwan a severe flood. These natural disasters are out of our expectations. So is luck a kind of thing that is beyond of our expectations.

An opportunity can be arranged by God, and it can also be made by us. No matter how an opportunity appears, the most important thing is how we seize it and make the best use of it. For instance, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios dropped out of  college after six months’ studying because he could not see the value in it. He chose to take calligraphy classes, something about typography. And the classes he had taken became practical when he designed the first Macintosh computer. Another thing is a few years after he started Apple Computer, he was kicked out by his own company. After a short time depression, he soon got on his feet again. He decided to start new companies. A few years later, he started NeXT and Pixar Company. And it was amazing that Pixar created the world’s first computer animation film and the technology he had developed in NeXT became a part of main source in Apple Company after Jobs went back to Apple.

The opportunities Jobs had met and embraced made him achieve his goal. I think it is just like what he said, “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” Moreover, the movie Burlesque is also a story which talks about a young lady who fights for her life and makes many opportunities for herself; after she repeatedly strived for going up the stage, she became a rising star by chance one day.

 It is said that luck favors the well-prepared. If we have strength, when we meet the opportunity, we will seize it easily. On the contrary, if we have less strength, even though we are given the opportunity, we will lose it soon. So do not dream that luck will drop to you from heaven one day; working hard on what we really want to do is the real thing we have to do in our lives.