Why You’re Not Helping When You Say “Good Luck” (And What You Should Say Instead)
“Good luck.”
That’s fun to hear, right?
Someone is wishing good things will happen to you. We may not have done anything to deserve this good luck, but it feels good to know someone is rooting for us.
Luck is defined as “success or failure brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions”. Translation: luck can be good or bad, and also completely random — it doesn’t choose who it happens to. In this definition, luck doesn’t care who you are. You can have bad luck if you’re a good person, and vice-versa.
That is not fun.
What do you do when you have bad luck? Do you give up? Do you curse the world? Do you get upset and wait for some “good luck” to happen?
I’ve done all of those.
However, after longer than I care to admit, I realized, with luck, you are wishing for/relying on/waiting for something you can’t control…
- How do you know good luck is coming?
- How do you know you won’t keep getting bad luck?
If you wait too long, then you’re in a bad situation and you don’t know how to get out of it. You may feel defeated, worried, and hopeless. You’re trapped, and you wonder why…
