By Kuldip Raj Chopra
Luck, much like money, time and physical energy, appears to be a finite resource as we travel through life. We notice it when it comes our way and feel its absence when it does not. But perhaps what we see, recognise and count as luck is only the visible part. There may be a much larger, unmapped portion hidden somewhere along the road of life.
We cannot discover it simply by waiting for it. We have to move. We have to work, take decisions, take risks and keep exploring. In that sense, our work is the digging through which we may uncover what was hidden from us. And when we uncover something, we may not immediately figure out if it’s good luck or bad luck.
This is why luck and effort are so difficult to separate while we are actually living our lives. We work, make decisions and take risks, but then something happens that we could neither have planned nor controlled. Our effort takes us forward; luck determines, at least partly, what we encounter on the way. Only later do we begin to understand how the two worked together.
This becomes especially important when we are young. We do not have the patience to wait and see what life will reveal. We want to move forward, achieve something and prove ourselves. We need the feeling that we can do it. Sometimes that feeling becomes overconfidence. We believe we can move mountains.
Looking back, that overconfidence may appear foolish. But at that age, it can be a great force. It gives us the vigour to accept challenges we may otherwise avoid. It makes us persist in our exploration further, especially when the first attempt does not give us the desired result. We keep digging because we believe that something worthwhile must be there.
And this is where failure may enter the journey.
When our first attempt fails, we are forced to look at the other side of the problem. What appeared to be a dead end, may reveal another direction. The result may not be what we originally wanted, and it may not even be the maximum we could have achieved. Yet it may be meaningful enough to make us continue.
So failure is not always the end of an effort. Sometimes, it changes the direction of the effort. What began as a search for one thing may lead us to another. At that moment, we may name it as a compromise. However, later, we realise that the compromise itself had become a part of the journey.
I have seen something similar in the mining industry. When the drilling begins, it is based on survey information and an expectation about what lies underground. Suppose we expect metallurgical coal, used for making steel, but instead find coal of lower quality, more suitable for a power plant. The result is not what we originally expected.
Yet in our final discussion, we could present our findings differently: we had explored this new low-grade coal for power generation and had discovered another resource. The coal had not changed. What changed was the meaning we gave to the result. Perhaps we can do something similar with our own lives.
As we grow older, we remember our successes more readily when speaking to the next generation. Some failures remain quietly hidden. We may be shy about discussing them, or may not want to expose the whole truth of our disappointments. A difficult decision may later be described as a necessary choice. A disappointment may become an experience. A result that fell short of what we wanted may become a compromised success.
But with age comes something youth does not have: time to review our own past. The failure that once hurt us may have pushed us in another direction. The opportunity we missed may have made another opportunity possible. The result that seemed inadequate at the time may have proved sufficient for what came later.
Slowly, the separate events begin to lose their sharp boundaries.
Old age may have weaker legs, but the years those legs walked have gathered a great deal. Success and failure, luck and effort, achievement and compromise— have all been experienced, and have left a residue.
At this stage, we can look back and ask again: how much of our life was created by our own effort, how much by luck, and how much by destiny?
There is still no mathematical answer.
The luck we could see and count was finite. But perhaps the unmapped portion was much larger than we knew. We encountered some of it through our work, some through our decisions, some through failures and some through circumstances entirely beyond our control.
By then, the dissection hardly matters.
What mattered at twenty may not matter in the same way at eighty. The young person wanted to know whether he had won or lost. The older person can see that both winning and losing contributed to the person he eventually became.
This is where the horizon becomes meaningful.
We know that the horizon is technically an illusion. There is no physical line where the earth and sky actually meet. Yet from a distance we see it as a beautiful, cohesive boundary.
Perhaps a long life looks like that when viewed from old age.
When we are close to each event, we see separate colours. This was luck. That was hard work. This was a failure. That was a success. Here we made a mistake. There we achieved more than expected.
But when we move far enough away, the separation becomes less important.
Everything begins to merge.
The visible luck and the luck we never recognised, the effort and the overconfidence that gave us the courage to make it, the failures that forced us to change direction, the compromises that later acquired a different meaning, the successes that gave us confidence. even the disappointments we once preferred to hide — all of these become part of the same picture.
A rainbow does not ask us to identify which colour contributed more than another. Its beauty lies precisely in the fact that different colours exist together and create one whole.
Perhaps that is what a long life finally gives us—not an exact account of how much was luck, how much was effort, and how much was destiny, but the ability to see them together.
We may still remember the failures. We may still wish that some things had happened differently. But we no longer need to live by the accounting system of youth, where every event must be declared a success or a failure.
We can simply cherish the whole.
And perhaps that is what we finally have to offer the generation that comes after us. Not a perfect story in which everything went according to plan, but a real journey in which we worked, took chances, failed, adjusted, accepted compromises, discovered unexpected opportunities and kept moving.
The rainbow is not a record of perfect colours.
It is beautiful because all the colours are there.
Perhaps life is the same. The luck we saw, the luck we never saw, the efforts we made, the failures we endured and the compromises we accepted have all travelled with us.
Only at the end do we have enough distance to see what finally emerged — a cohesive rainbow—something not merely to explain, but to cherish, to enjoy, and perhaps, with honesty and affection, to show to those who will continue their journey after us.
Kuldip Raj Chopra is a retired mechanical engineer and graduate in Industrial Engineering. With a distinguished career spanning over 36 years in the coal industry, he retired as a Chief General Manager. Now, in this reflective phase of life, he applies his deep understanding of systems, effort, and balance to the human journey, exploring the intersection of timeless philosophy and everyday generational wisdom.
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