"I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often"
About this Quote
Luck gets demoted here from cosmic roulette to something closer to a numbers game. Brian Tracy’s line isn’t trying to comfort you with magical thinking; it’s trying to recruit you into a behavioral system. “Predictable” is the tell: he’s reframing luck as an output of inputs you control, which is classic self-help rhetoric with a managerial spine. The promise is seductive because it replaces the anxiety of randomness with the clean logic of agency.
The intent is motivational, but the subtext is a mild indictment. If luck can be engineered by “showing up,” then being stuck starts to look like a failure of participation. Tracy isn’t just encouraging risk; he’s normalizing visibility and motion as moral virtues. “Be more active” reads like a creed for a culture that confuses activity with progress, and attendance with merit. The quote flatters the reader into thinking they’re one calendar adjustment away from a better life.
Context matters: Tracy emerges from the late-20th-century productivity and sales ecosystem, where outcomes often do correlate with volume of attempts. In that world, more calls, more pitches, more rooms entered really can manufacture “luck” through exposure and repetition. The line works because it converts an intangible (fortune) into a set of concrete behaviors, giving people something to do immediately.
It also quietly edits out structural realities: gatekeeping, unequal risk, and the fact that some people can “take chances” without catastrophic downside. Still, as a piece of pragmatic persuasion, it’s strong: it sells courage as logistics.
The intent is motivational, but the subtext is a mild indictment. If luck can be engineered by “showing up,” then being stuck starts to look like a failure of participation. Tracy isn’t just encouraging risk; he’s normalizing visibility and motion as moral virtues. “Be more active” reads like a creed for a culture that confuses activity with progress, and attendance with merit. The quote flatters the reader into thinking they’re one calendar adjustment away from a better life.
Context matters: Tracy emerges from the late-20th-century productivity and sales ecosystem, where outcomes often do correlate with volume of attempts. In that world, more calls, more pitches, more rooms entered really can manufacture “luck” through exposure and repetition. The line works because it converts an intangible (fortune) into a set of concrete behaviors, giving people something to do immediately.
It also quietly edits out structural realities: gatekeeping, unequal risk, and the fact that some people can “take chances” without catastrophic downside. Still, as a piece of pragmatic persuasion, it’s strong: it sells courage as logistics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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