On luck, readiness, and why it shouldn’t take a catastrophe to give ourselves permission
Jim Collins asked a room full of people to write down the moment that changed the course of their lives, and I picked up my pen, wrote one word in my journal, and then sat there staring at it, a little horrified at myself.
COVID.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I know the magnitude of the pandemic. So very many people got sick, so many died, and so many lost work, lost people they loved, and lost time they will never get back. I don’t take any of that lightly. And still, sitting in that room, the most honest answer I had was that the pandemic was one of the luckiest stretches of my life.
The day was built around Collins’s new book, What to Make of a Life, and early on he walked us through an idea he calls NATILIE, short for “not all time in life is equal.” These are the seasons that carry more weight than the rest, that catch you off guard and ask you to rise whether you feel ready or not, and that shape everything after them. Some are crises, some are breakthroughs, and some are both.
Then he talked about luck, which he has studied for years.
“What luck” is the random event you never planned for, the diagnosis or the market crash or the job that opens out of nowhere.
“Who luck” is the person who crosses your path and changes your direction (for Collins, his mentor Bill Lazier).
And “Zeit luck”, the one that made me sit up, is when who you’ve been quietly becoming meets what a particular moment in history makes possible.
What stuck with me was his point that luck itself tends to even out over a lifetime. But what separates people is what they do with it, and whether they’ve prepared enough to recognize the moment and act.
That’s when I understood why I’d written COVID.
I’m an introvert, which surprises anyone who has met me because I can be the life of the party. I’m not shy and I’m certainly not quiet, and I like people enormously. But too many of them for too long drains something in me that only time alone refills, and for most of my adult life I experienced a quiet deficit; saying yes to the dinner and the reception and the happy hour because that is what a capable, connected woman does, and then driving home empty.
Then the world closed, and nobody needed me anywhere.
I was living alone, the obligations disappeared almost overnight, and my energy came back to me tenfold. I was more rested than I’d been in years, which felt strange to admit while the news was so bad.
With that energy, I showed up at work in ways I didn’t know I had in me, helping my colleagues and our company reimagine what was possible at exactly the moment everyone needed to.
With that energy, I ate better, moved more, deepened my spiritual and creative practices, and felt better in my body than I ever had.
And with that energy and all that unclaimed time, I finally heard the thing I’d been writing in my journal for twenty years and ignoring. I needed to move to Colorado, and I needed to change a lot more than my zip code. The mountains outside my window today started there.
That, for me, was Zeit luck. The quiet arrived at a point when I’d done enough work on myself to actually hear what my heart and soul were telling me.
What I keep coming back to is this: it should not take a pandemic for a woman to be allowed to stop.
It should not take the entire world shutting down for us to protect our energy, decline the invitation, rest without earning it, and listen to the want we’ve buried under everyone else’s needs.
I needed a global crisis to excuse me from being endlessly available, and I don’t think I’m unusual. I think a lot of us learned something in those months about what we’d been tolerating, and then the world reopened and we walked straight back into it. But the knowing didn’t go anywhere, and I suspect you still have yours.
So I’ll leave you with the questions Collins left me, and one of my own. What has been the NATILIE moment of your life, the season that asked more of you than any other and reshaped everything after it?
Can you name the What, the Who, and the Zeit luck that brought you here, and were you ready for them?
And the harder one: what did you learn about yourself when the world went quiet, and what would it take to start living by it?
We never know when we will find ourselves in a NATILIE moment or experiencing What, Who or Zeit luck. How can you prepare for that moment?
I’d love to hear.
