Ashwin Sanghi Quotes Roman Philosopher Seneca: ‘Luck Is A Matter Of Preparation Meeting Opportunity’

Mr. Ashwin Sanghi, a former member of the Club, spoke at the last meeting on “Thirteen steps to bloody good luck.” Apurva Diwanji introduced him as one of India’s highest-selling English fiction authors. All his novels (The Rozabal Line, Chanakya’s Chant, The Krishna Key and Private India, the last a collaboration with James Patterson) have been on best-selling lists in India, the UK and the USA. His latest work, Thirteen Steps to Bloody Good Luck, a motivational, self-help book, is also a best-seller. At present he is working on his next, Sialkot Saga, to be published in 2016. Mr. Sanghi started his talk by describing a scene in a courtroom where a little girl is telling a judge and a jury how she was viciously raped and beaten by a group of men. In the court is a detached lawyer who, while hearing the girl, wonders – what if her father decided to seek revenge?

What if he went after the people who had perpetrated the act? That lawyer was John Grisham. He wrote a novel, A Time to Kill, which became a big hit and made him one of the highest selling authors in the world, with 250 million copies sold to date. Was this a case of just good luck? That he was at the right place at the right time? Was it the circumstances that made him lucky? Not really, because the novel was rejected by 28 publishers before finally being brought out with a paltry run of 5,000 copies. There were many such examples. J.K. Rowling was told by 12 publishers that the Harry Potter books were not worth publishing. One of them sarcastically said, “Don’t lose your day job!” Richard Bach of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull had 18 rejections. Stephen King, a master thriller writer, was rejected 30 times. Chicken Soup for the Soul had 33 rejections. Even a classic like Gone With the Wind had 38.

“And topping the list,” he sid jovially, “is Ashwin Sanghi, with 47 rejections!” One of his friends in publishing even told him that people in the industry never agreed on anything, but they all seemed to agree that he couldn’t write! So he asked himself, “Why am I going through the process of attempting to prove myself as a writer?” He felt like the youngster who, when he requested Samuel Johnson to read his manuscript, was told, “Your manuscript is good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not too good!”

Recalling the words of Somerset Maugham who said “There are three rules for writing a novel; unfortunately, no one knows what they are!” Mr. Sanghi said that his situation was quite similar; he had had no clue about what he was doing and appeared to have embarked on a foolhardy endeavour. He then found “enlightenment”, first while talking to a gentleman who said that life was 99% luck and 1% bloody good luck, and then while speaking with a friend about the rat race. (See Page 1) Mr. Sanghi said that his favourite quotation was by the Roman philosopher Seneca who said, “Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.”

Sadly, luck is associated with symbols like four-leaf clovers, animal sacrifices, astrology, numerology, pilgrimages, blessings, evil eyes, dragons, stones, gems and voodoo. These symbols make it appear as though luck is something that comes down from the heavens. It is not seen as a human quality or character trait. “When we say, ‘He’s lucky,’ then it’s not something he has done, it’s something that came to him,” Mr. Sanghi observed. Napoleon, however, thought differently. When one of his new generals was being praised for his abilities, Mr. Sanghi narrated, Napoleon asked, “But tell me, is he lucky?”

What Napoleon was saying was that being lucky could be worked upon. It was like public speaking, conversational skills, personality development or speed reading. One can actually work on luck. Generally, there are three types of luck – dumb luck, constitutional luck and circumstantial luck. In dumb luck, someone walking on the road finds cash. No one can explain why this happens. As for constitutional luck, it depends on which family one is born into. Is it wealthy or poor? If someone is working in an office where his boss happens to be from his hometown, and he gets promoted more often as a result, that is also constitutional luck. But circumstantial luck is the most interesting. This is related to opportunities and outcomes. In life there come opportunities that one accepts and opportunities that one ignores.

The outcomes are either success or failure. “If we take an opportunity and it works, that’s good luck. But if we ignore it and it works for someone else, that’s bad luck. When we take the opportunity and it fails, that’s also bad luck. But if we ignore the opportunity and it turns out to be a dud, that’s good luck! Therefore, how we respond to opportunities and how the outcomes pan out determines whether we are lucky or not.” Mr. Sanghi gave the example of the rainwater harvesting process and asked, what if humans are like houses? What if opportunities are raining down all the time? Some people can trap those opportunities as they fall, but some don’t have the equipment to catch the opportunities.

Therefore, it is essential to equip oneself to catch good luck. “Bloody good luck” is simply the ability to catch opportunities as they present themselves. “So it is clear that good luck is related to our ability to raise (or increase) our opportunities, recognise the valuable ones and to respond to them.” Mr. Sanghi narrated incidents from the lives of the great Pandit Ravi Shankar and Richard Branson to buttress the point that good luck is more an opportunity than anything else. In the case of Ravi Shankar, it was clear that “lucky people grow and strengthen their network.” Richard Branson, on the other hand, took calculated risks, cut his losses and learnt from his mistakes. Mr. Sanghi said when one looked at the world of random possibilities, there were bound to be moments of luck. This could happen over a period of time, say, a 20-year, 30-year or 40-year period.

“I am talking about a series of activities that we keep working at, again and again, in order to make the odds eventually work in our favour. It won’t happen every time. It’s like the stock market graph, even if you say that the stock market between 1991, the onset of liberalisation, and now has appreciated ‘x’ number of times, there would have been huge troughs along the way,” he added. Luck, it seems, works the same way.