SCHOOL OF COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING SCIENCES (SCES)

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS

ENGINEERING
HED 1202
COMMUNICATION SKILLS II
Individual chapter review Assignment

Chapter summary :

You Have to be Good to be Lucky ( The Hard Truth About Soft Skill by Peggy Klauss)

DATE: 1st October 2021

LECTURER: ESTHER KARIUKI

BY:Elie Mukongo 137477

From the chapter, we get to see Betsy talk of her career, come up from when she started from
the non-profit world to project consulting. She did not have an MBA in the field but only had a
BA in psychology but none the less this did not stop her from taking action. This however led
one of the persona’s friends to say that she was incredibly lucky since he/she knew colleagues
with PhDs yet hadn’t started up any consulting project. Betsy however didn’t consider her
success as luck since she believed that she had earned everything she had from her hard work.

As one of the great greeks quoted “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”,
and so did Betsy believe. The persona to believes so when she said “Getting what’s called “a
lucky break” is almost always the result of the groundwork we ourselves laid”. Betsy believes
that success has nothing to do with luck most of the time, but hard work, determination, and the
right attitude gets you there. In a lottery is where luck plays a major role since there is no
preparation nor any time set to win it. The persona encourages us (the readers) to go against
our ways and to bring more luck into our lives by cultivating new habits and breaking our old
routines.

In my opinion, success does not only depend on hard work. As “Rico Carty said, They say you
have to be good to be lucky, but I think you have to be lucky to be good." I think he was right for
the same reason that if hard work was synonymous with success, then our African mothers
would be above the hudge Piramide that defines this world, but due to the circumstances of life,
some of them are condemned to work hard in fields their in villages. Few of them are those who
manage to stand out and approach the spike of the Piramide, but this is on condition that life
has smiled on them and gave them the chance to be born in an environment where they have
access to education, a place where they will not be discriminated by men.

Vis-à-vis to ”the article published by Michael Shermer on November 1, 2017 , the chapter
“YOU HAVE TO BE GOOD TO BE LUCKY does not totally share the same opinion in the fact
Luck may sometimes come before the fact of being good, working hard, etc. since It explains
that realizing how many variables are beyond our control is a sobering experience: the luck of
someone being born in the first place; The odds of being born in a rich country with a
decentralized government, sound economy, and decent infrastructure, as opposed to, say, a
third world country with an unstable political system, The chance of being born at a moment in
history when your specific talents and interests coincided with the zeitgeist”.

On the other hand, “the article published by Scott Barry Kaufman on March 1, 2018 has the
same opinion as our chapter because its main ideas are: Chance, luck, and opportunity all play
a part in influencing an individual's eventual level of success., according to researchers at
Oxford University. They claim that any strategy that has the ability to affect these elements will
lead to more collective development and creativity in society.A dynamic environment with many
possibilities, a strong education, intense training, and an effective plan for distributing cash and
resources are all essential factors in increasing people's chances of success”.

In conclusion, we can say that there is nothing dumb about luck

 Bibliography

K .Starr, Can You Learn to Be Lucky?: Why Some People Seem to Win More Often Than
Others, August 14, 2018 – Hardcover .

A. Rovira ,F. Trias de Bes , Good Luck: Creating the Conditions for Success in Life and
Business, August 24, 2004 – Hardcover.

Citing literature
The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized (Scott Barry Kaufman) Scientific
American ( March 1, 2018)
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-
we-realized/

What Is the Secret of Success? ( Michael Shermer) in Scientific American 317, 5, 80 (November 2017)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1117-80
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-success-come-mostly-from-talent-hard-work-mdash-or-
luck/