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What’s Luck Got to Do With It?

Everything. And if you think otherwise, you’re fooling yourself.

Gray Miller
5 min readFeb 8, 2022

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It was an otherwise fantastic article.

It was long form, and she was a great writer. She is almost 70 years old, and a badass woman doing badass things like climbing mountains and flying planes and traveling the world.

As a man approaching his 53rd birthday, I happen to love stories of life isn’t over! Her article was a clarion call to take big bites out of life, even — or especially — if you’re in your later years.

And then she said something that ruined it all. Something that made me question everything she’d written, question any authority she might have, something that made me doubt whether I’d ever want to read anything else by her.

She was listing all the reasons she got to do all the amazing things that she did, and in the list was this statement:

“Luck doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”

I don’t know a lot about this person — I’ve only read one article by her, after all.

But even with that limited knowledge, I can tell she’s pretty lucky.

Let me count some ways:

  • She’s born white, with all the privileges that…

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Gray Miller
Gray Miller

Written by Gray Miller

Gray is a former Marine dancer grandpa visualist who writes to help adults figure out what they want to be when they grow up.

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