Look around at all the millionaires, all the celebrities, all the politicians, all the owners of successful businesses--anyone and everyone who embodies the classical archetype our society defines as "successful," and they ALL invariably have one thing in common, and I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of them will refuse admitting this key, uniting factor to their success: Luck.

All the time, we're told what it takes to become successful and have a happy life: A positive attitude, persistence, drive, charisma, education, discipline, kindness, creativity, confidence, constitution, etc. I'm not trying to negate the importance of these qualities, but you have to admit that sheer dumb LUCK plays just as pivotal a role in achieving your dreams and realizing your goals as anything else. Let me break it down for you with a few examples:

Music. As someone who majored in music composition in college, I've been exposed to a WIDE variety of music--far wider than the average Joe Listener, I'm quite sure. I've heard musicians and composers who have flat-out PHENOMENAL talent, on par with any winner of American Idol, any major pop artist on the radio, or even any famous classical artist such as YoYo Ma. Yes, I've heard and met absolute nobodies like myself that could play a concert with YoYo Ma and keep up with him on all levels of musicality and artistry, and it's not just because of the intimate nature of music being a personal, varying craft. The music world is simply supersaturated. Roughly half of all households in the USA have at least one musician in them, of some form or another. And sure, not EVERYONE in all those households is out to be the next Madonna, Tim Minchin, or even the next Justin Bieber, but there's still enough trying to turn their passion of music into their primary source of income that the industry just can't accommodate everyone.

But you'd expect the music industry to weed out all the crappy, mediocre, and barely-above-average musicians to favor only the creme de le creme, right? I wish that were the case, but the reality is that there are only so many music scouts, only so many managers and agents, only so many record label CEOs, and they all have their own opinions on what's good music as well as what's marketable music, and they just can't keep up with EVERY SINGLE musician on the planet. There's more of us than there are of them--even the most talented of us actively TRYING to get discovered--and the end result is just a dice game, where if you're lucky, your talent gets discovered, marketed, appreciated and incorporated into the zeitgeist, and you get to laugh all the way to the bank.

Money. Here's another one not as many of you might immediately consider. I've read a few books on investing, for both short and long term goals. Some of what I've read has actually been helpful, insightful, and full of genuine, no-nonsense fiscal knowledge, covering everything from stocks and bonds to small businesses and commercial real estate. But when you're starting from scratch, saving up for your first bit of investment can take a while before you have enough capital to make your money work for you to generate more of itself. So where does luck come into play with this? Well, consider the following scenario: You're working a regular job, paying your bills on time each month and putting aside a little every paycheck to save up for an investment of your choice. Suddenly, you have a life emergency--a hospital visit, a car accident, a hurricane hitting your house, whatever--and suddenly you have to dip into those savings for investments to pay off your debts. So what happens when you're just constantly getting something happening to you, just as you're about done digging yourself out of your LAST financial hole? What if your life is like the opening minutes of Pixar's "Up," and no matter how many times you try to save up to invest, it always ends up having to go to patch up a shortfall? Bottom line: You have to be LUCKY enough to go long enough in your life without having to touch that initial start-up capital until you're ready to invest it as you planned. And that's not even factoring in the luck factors with other aspects of investments: a volatile stock or housing market, new or changing laws that could affect the efficacy of your investment plan, or a down economy hurting your start-up business sales, just to name a few.

Happiness. "Okay," you might be saying now, "but in the midst of all this, you can STILL be a success if you just maintain the right attitude in life, right? You don't have to have luck and be a 'success' in the classic sense to live a happy life, right?" Well, just being happy STILL boils down to luck. Even though we all seek happiness in life, we don't always all find it. You might not have the luck of stumbling across whatever philosophy inspires the greatest happiness in you. You might be born with some severe form of depression that prevents you from ever maintaining such a positive outlook on life for a length of time extended enough to yield a positive impact through the manifestation of emotion-based action. And if you're prone to bouts of depression AND you have a life that continually is unlucky in other regards, you might end up severely damaged emotionally and psychologically.

So like it or not, some people are just luckier than others. Some people get blessed with the right genes to be more easily happy, to have a great singing voice, to be intelligent, or have whatever other hand-up attribute combined with the luck of being born into a healthy, nurturing environment to let such attributes flourish into a positive, successful, happy life. We revere such people, find their life stories inspiring, and try to find ways to model our own lives after theirs. Of course, there's the other kind of lucky combination of having a genetic predisposition to a mindset determined to overcome obstacles combined with a life of adversity to test such resolve, which still yields in the type of life that inspires us. The point, though, is that it still comes down to luck of the draw.

If this news all seems like a major downer to those of you itching to be happy and successful in life, please forgive me; I reveal all this because I believe in objectivity and a realistic perspective in life. So now, given the understanding of luck's impact on our lives and achieving the things we seek and desire most, the question becomes HOW do we tilt the odds in our favor? I think ultimately, it requires tilting the odds in EVERYONE'S favor, because the easier a time society at large has of finding happiness and success, the easier a time you will find such goals in your own life; after all, if your own works can give rise to others doing good works to improve society as a whole--if we're all working for the betterment of the group--then the group yields a greater amount of positive results. Want your kids and future generations to have a better luck of the draw for a healthy, nurturing environment? Work to improve technology, infrastructure, education, or any other aspect of society. It's what we as a people have been doing for thousands of years. Want more people to have the opportunity at happiness that took YOU so long to figure out, to have instant access to the revelations of philosophy you had to work for years to uncover? Tell as many as you can. It's what writers and philosophers and religious witnesses have been doing for thousands of years.

The bottom line is to just keep DOING. Just keep doing something--anything--that yields in positivism. Do. Not. Stop. And the more you do this with as much genuine candor as you can muster, then you're basically doing as much as you can. And yes, at times, all that may include is to keep as positive a mindset as you can by defining your happiness and success through what you've already accomplished, as opposed to what you have yet to have the luck to achieve. All those qualities I mentioned above in the second paragraph--the ones that our idols claim were their keys to their own success--these are not lessons to be spurned just because we realize luck is also a factor. Tilting the odds in our favor REQUIRES us to work as ardently as we can, to adopt all those positive qualities as best as we can, and hope for the best as we continually put ourselves out there. Luck may be the coin flip that decides whether or not you get everything you dreamt of in life, but the coin will never even be tossed if you don't first try yourself. Remember: Even if you take only a couple steps, you're still lapping everyone still sitting on the couch. This doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful--it just guarantees that you'll have a better shot than if you do nothing.