Is Success Just Hard Work Or Luck?

Your life is like a gumball machine.

When you choose to put a coin in the machine, you can get red balls, white balls, green balls, or gold balls.

However, the gumball that decides to come out of the machine is only dependent on how many coins you have.

In today’s hustle culture, we are told to grind, hustle and work every waking hour of the day. Motivational gurus tell us to idolize the rich and powerful, like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Oprah. They tell us that if we work just as hard as they do, then we will be “successful” (whatever that means). And if we don’t, we are seen as lazy, a failure, a deadbeat person who has no skills or dreams.

On the flip side, the people around us tell a different story. They think that these influential people only got to their position due to luck, a major coincidence, or a privileged upbringing. These people must have cheated their way through the system in order to acquire such wealth and influence.

But did they?

Is success just a stroke of luck or small, consistent steps of work? Or is it both?

However, before we dive into the Gumball Analogy, we have to define what success means.

What Does Success Mean To You?

Well, only you can answer that question because success is subjective. Everyone has their own metric of success.

The person sitting next to you could think that success is living a luxurious life. A life filled with fast cars, mansions, wealth, power, yachts on a private beach, and dining with gorgeous people.

The person sitting behind you could think success is living a simple and quiet life in a cabin in the mountains. A life filled with nature, animals, peace, fresh air, a large lake, and a fireplace in the living room next to a bookshelf.

The person sitting in front of you could think that success is travelling and exploring. A life where they have the freedom to venture out into any country and learn about the local traditions and culture. A life where they are not tied down to one place and move nomadically.

These are some of the many ideas people have of success, but I want you to define what your ‘success’ means to YOU.

For me personally, success means many things.

It means;

• Living a faith centred life as a Christian
• Having a healthy body, mind, and spirit
• Being able to be creative and create things that give value to people
• Having more time to spend doing things that I enjoy and learning about the world around me
• Spending time with family, friends, pets and meeting people to practice my social skills

However, these are my ideas of success, not yours. I encourage you to define what your idea of success is.

Grab a pen and a notebook and write down your own definition of success.

Once you have that, now it's time to look at the Gumball Analogy.

The Gumball Analogy

Like I said before, the gumball machine represents your life.

And in the machine, contains four different types of gumballs.

The White Gumballs

The white gumballs represent no change, no action, and no progress in your definition of success. It's the time when you tried to do something or start something but it never grew into anything substantial.

For example, when you tried to wake up at 6 am in the morning. You write that goal down and are excited to finally wake up early and get things done. You set your alarm and go to bed.

The next day, when your alarm blares loudly at 6 am, you groan, turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. You wake up at 10 am instead.

There was no change or action. Therefore, you got a white gumball.

The Red Gumballs

The red gumballs represent a mistake, a failure, or a mishap in your goal of success. It's the time when you tried something new or different but it failed. You made a mistake or took the wrong turn.

An example of this would be starting a business. When you try to build a business, it takes time, resources, energy, and investments to create a product and be able to sell it on the market.

However, the product was not profitable and you were not able to reach many customers in the market.

This could be seen as a failure or a mishap. Unfortunately, you got a red gumball.

The Green Gumballs

The green gumballs represent growth, a step in the right direction, where you see yourself slowly progressing towards the goals that you have defined as success. It's the times where you see little spurts of progress or when you took one step up on your goal.

For example, let’s say you want to create a habit of writing more often. So you create a plan that on Monday is when you will write the first paragraph of your article.

When Monday comes around, you sit at your desk, open up your laptop and begin writing. In a couple of hours, you finish writing that paragraph and close your laptop.

This is progress because you started writing your article. So, you got a green gumball.

The Gold Gumballs

This is the holy grail of gumballs! Everyone wants to get a gold gumball.

This gumball represents success, the accomplishment of your goal. You sold that product, created that habit, bought yourself a new home, or travelled to a different country (whatever your metric of success is). Nevertheless, you have achieved it.

For example, you set out your goal to buy your first, new home. So you manage your finances by saving up, budgeting, cutting down on unnecessary expenses, and investing in assets. You find a real estate agent and spend most of your weekends looking at houses in your area.

This process takes you about a year to do.

Finally, you have enough money to put down a deposit on a house. From there, you begin to move in and settle down.

You achieved your goal of buying a house. Congratulations, you got a gold gumball.

The Catch

Now, be warned there is a catch in this gumball machine.

There is not an equal amount of each coloured gumball in the machine. Rather there is a lot of white and red gumballs, there is a smaller amount of green gumballs and an even smaller amount of gold gumballs.

This means that the chances of you getting a white and red gumball are higher than getting a green gumball. Likewise, the chances you getting a gold gumball are even lower than getting a green gumball.

But, you have an unlimited supply of coins to put into the gumball machine!

These coins represent the number of times you try something new or different. It's the times when you tried to exercise, when you tried to read that book or when you tried to learn about investing.

But only you decide how many times you try something.

So is success down to hard work or luck?

Well, it's both because the more times you try inserting a coin into the gumball machine, the increases your chances of getting a gold gumball.

How Do We Get A Gold Gumball?

Try Again

If we didn’t get a gold gumball the first time, then we insert another coin into the machine.

This means that if we didn’t achieve a goal on the first try, we simply try again.

And this time, we might get a different coloured ball, but either way, if we keep trying, this will increase our chances of getting that gold gumball.

For instance, if we want to start exercising in the morning, we can prepare for it by setting our workout clothes on the bed, setting our alarm, and planning our workout for when we wake up.

When the alarm wakes us up in the morning but we choose to hit the snooze button and sleep in.

We can try again for the next day and repeat.

Do It Differently

If we consistently are getting red gumballs (i.e. failing or making mistakes) as we head towards our goal. We can change how to approach the goal.

Let’s say if we are trying to sell our business product via cold calls and emails but this does not garner any customers. Maybe we can change the marketing strategy to using social media to promote our business product. We can reach out to influencers within our target audience and ask them to sponsor our product.

By seeing a different alternative or route to achieve our goal, increases the chances of receiving a gold gumball.

Be Consistent

We need to be consistent with inserting the coins into our gumball machine.

This means we need to preserve even when the machine gives us white or red gumballs.

For example, when starting to write articles online, you will receive white gumballs, where the audience does not read your work so there is no change or action being made.

You will also receive red gumballs, where you make grammar or spelling mistakes. Your writing may not be at a professional standard yet but that’s okay. If you are consistent at it and keep inserting coins into the gumball machine. You will receive a green gumball and hopefully a gold gumball.

This will take time and consistency.

Conclusion

So, if you simply skimmed through, here is a summary.

Define your metric of success. What does ‘success’ mean to you as a person?

The Gumball Analogy consists of the gumball machine that represents your life.

The white gumballs represent no change or action.

The red gumballs represent mistakes and failures.

The green gumballs represent growth and small progress.

The gold gumballs represent success and reaching your goals.

There are more white and red gumballs in the machine than green and gold gumballs but you have an unlimited supply of coins.

The coins represent the number of times you try to achieve your goal.

How do we do this?

• Try again
• Do it differently
• Be consistent

Thanks for reading!