What's Luck Got to Do with It?

I wrote my masterpiece in eighth grade. I got an F on it.

Our assignment was to write an argumentative essay about the characteristic of a successful person. A critical reader would point out that most successful people have more than one characteristic, but we were told to pick one and explain why it was the most important.

I was extremely confused by the topic. First, I didn't really know any super-successful people off the top of my head. Who would I have considered to be that great back in 1982? Ronald Reagan? Phil Collins? My father? How would I find the one single characteristic that would become the focus of a five-paragraph essay?

I chose luck. I remember that many of my friends had chosen perseverance. I knew even as an eighth grader that my vocabulary was a little more advanced than most of my class. I figured that if I didn't know what perseverance was, the majority of my classmates certainly didn't. They'd been spoon-fed the word by a teacher. I was going to go my own way and write my own essay.

The day the papers were handed back, the teacher announced to the class that almost everyone should be proud of the work. Except for one person, everyone in the class had passed. I was aware of an eerie silence in the room and had a real sense of foreboding. I had not taken the teacher's advice to write about determination or persistence. When I was handed my paper, and everyone in the room was looking at me, I had to fight back tears.

It wasn't until my junior year of college that I tried to write anything creative again. One of my stories was voted best in my creative writing class. I voted for someone else's. Two of my essays were first draft keepers in expository writing and a couple of my stories got published in college journals, but I still had no confidence in my ability to write.

Then in one of those writing classes, we read George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which is fantastic. In it, Orwell quoted the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes as an example of good writing.

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Time and chance happeneth to them all. The book that more Americans claim to believe in than any other, one that gives spiritual comfort and inspiration to millions of 8th grade English teachers. . . was talking about luck.

Thus reinforced seven years after my failing grade, I persevered in my writing. I wrote under a pseudonym for two thousand music fans a month. I wrote for two medical technology magazines. I gradually became proud of my writing and started taking more chances. I wrote a short story and a series of essays that caused a girl named Shelly to write an e-mail to me. I married her. I found out later that the one that she liked most was the one that I was going to remove from the site. I'm lucky I didn't.

SO, while I've proven my classmates' poorly-argued yet teacher-supported point that perseverance does something, I think it has only increased the quantity of my work. Quality may come with practice and quantity, but it doesn't have to. Success may or may not follow quality. Depending how you define it, success may come with a first work that is extremely low quality. Perseverance has nothing to do with it. To an extent, being successful is really just a matter of luck.

How can one read Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities and not feel lucky to have been born (or adopted at least) white and male and middle class in the richest country on earth? The odds of that single phenomenon--life--alone are somewhere around 1 percent, a fact that is often ignored at relatively well-to-do Jamesville-DeWitt High School.

I was a victim of bad luck in eighth grade. If I hadn't had such a hole dug in my confidence for me by my English teacher, I would not have had to persevere in order to climb out of it. I think perseverance has a hidden meaning that was not discussed by any of my classmates in their papers: perseverance presumes a first failure. I didn't want to admit to such a possibility then, and I certainly wouldn't want to now. My English teacher's last laugh was only temporary. Ultimately, she failed, not me.

I am acutely aware of how lucky I've been, in spite of a temporary harm done to the creativity of a fourteen year old. My ability to see things a little differently is one of things that makes me feel most lucky.

I've been offered a job teaching English.

I hope my luck perseveres.