Luck

At a swim meet a few days ago, my coach pressured me into beating a girl swimming in the lane next to me. I immediately checked her times and thought: how am I going to beat her? I am nowhere close to her time. I was nervous and knew I couldn’t rely on luck to beat her. My teammates kept comforting me and said, “Good luck!” which I knew wouldn’t help me. My coach later talked to me and said he has faith in me because I’ve been working hard at practice. I knew that I’d been working hard and finally had confidence in my abilities. In the end, it wasn’t the luck that made me push through and beat her, but my hard work and dedication to the sport.

Each and every day, people in society dedicate their achievements and losses to the ever-present theory called luck. However, there is a misinterpretation with this theory. Luck is defined as “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions” (dictionary.com). If luck is present every single day, and all of our successes and failures are based on chance, then where does all our effort and hard work go? The reality of luck to me is having the right opportunity at the right time. Luck is nothing but a simple explanation that we give ourselves for the good and bad things that happen by chance in our lives. Luck is staying humble by hiding you skill and saying you were lucky, flattering others by telling them their failures were just bad luck, wishing someone good luck to help them deny the fact that they didn’t prepare well enough for a test or a speech or a presentation. Luck is not making it out alive through the Holocaust; that is strength, willpower, and tenacity. Vladek says that "to die, it's easy...but you have to struggle for life" (Spiegelman 122). Art’s father did not make it out of the Holocaust based on luck but based on having the right opportunity at the right time. This included the ability to speak multiple languages which gave him the opportunity to teach English to a German who protected and looked after him.