The dirty little secret that the successful don't like to admit. Note the distinction between your statement about "the successful" and the topic at hand - "hu

The dirty little secret that the successful don't like to admit. Note the distinction between your statement about "the successful" and the topic at hand - "huge success". Success isn't a simple binary dichotomy... it is, IMO, more of a continuum. One can be "successful" without being, say, a billionaire founder of a Silicon Valley unicorn. I would argue that we should keep this in mind when talking about what goes into success. Yeah, it probably does take some "luck" to become the billionaire guy (say, Mark Cuban or Mark Zuckerberg). But becoming the owner of a successful and growing landscaping business, or car dealership in your local town, etc., etc., etc? Maybe not as much so. That being said, you'll never win if you don't try. One must be prepared to take advantage of opportunity ("luck") when it happens, and showing up consistently (being in the right place) is half the battle. Being smart and working hard at the right things also vastly increases one's chances. Agreed. And since what most people are really talking about when they say "luck" - which is to say chance, uncontrollable events - are outside of our control anyway, there's no real reason to even think about it. All one can do is work as hard as possible, engage in the behaviors that tend to (create|discover|capture|foster|whatever-you-want-to-call-it) "good luck" and just take the ride as far as it goes. Cliches may be trite, but as a certain character in a certain movie once said "just because something is trite doesn't make it less true". And the old cliches "the harder I work, the luckier I get" and "luck = preparation + opportunity" still hold as far as I'm concerned.