Luck is when preparation meets opportunity

This is something told to me by Ng Kee Meng. Kee Meng is my wife's maternal uncle and is someone whom I have always considered as my mentor.

This is how he would say it. "There is no such thing as luck. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity." My mental reaction the first tme I heard this back in early 1995 was "O ya sure, what would you call something falling on your head?" That can't be a bad preparation! You would surely have to call that bad luck right? Well, if you were to view this as being at the wrong place and the wrong time then it does not contain the term "bad luck."
More seriously, I do noticed that opportunities are abound but I am really not in the position to take advantage of them. The following is an example of me not being prepared for an opportunity while a friend is.

Sometime around 1998, an associate company to the startup I was involved in was looking for a new GM and I was being approached for the job. The new GM will need to run a small factory that was having problem with yield. They were producing more WIP (work in progress that need rework) than finished products! I could have taken up the offer, suffer through the early period to learn up what is needed to fix the operation! I know I have sufficient brain to do that. However, since one of the shareholder is a friend, I felt that it is only right if I get him the right person for the job and forwarded this opportunity to two friends. One of them, like myself, is not familar with factory operation and process improvement declared himself unsuitable. The other took the job. This person have spent many years at Motorola and is a recognised as a process expert at Motorola. He finished his MBA about a year prior to this while working at Motorola and was just the person for the job. Within a period of about two years, this small factory had all their yield problem behind them. This friend was subsequently headhunted to be the MD of an American MNC.

It all starts with the intent

The way we go about responding and reacting with others around us is highly influenced by our primary intent. Accordingly, it is important that you start of with the correct intent. With the right intent, you will naturally say and do the right thing.

Don't just take my word for it though, the next time you asked someone something or response to someone in a particular way, asked yourself what your intent really was and had that intent been something else even just subtly different, how would you have asked/responded earlier.

In a similar manner, you could tell a person intent from the way they response and react to an issue.