What is luck?

What is luck?

In 2015, riding from Khanh Hoa to Quy Nhon, I dropped a two-liter water bottle. Just as I pulled over to pick it up, a husband and wife stopped, scooped it up, and rode over to hand it back to me. I smiled and thanked them. Ten minutes before that, another couple had slipped and fallen on the road — at the time, National Highway 1A was under construction — and I'd stopped to help them get back up. For the thousand-plus kilometers that followed, I never dropped a water bottle again.

They say do enough good things, and you'll run into luck.

When I got to Quang Binh and had just parked to visit General Giap's grave, I ran into two old men on their way out. One asked me for some water — he only had ice, no water. I filled his bottle and chatted: so you two are headed up to Hanoi as well? That Hoa-Saigonese accent is unmistakable (it's the accent I've been hearing since the day I was born). After paying my respects to General Giap, on the way to Thanh Hoa I caught up with them again, and they treated me to chicken congee and Saigon beer. When I woke up the next morning to split the room fee, they were already gone — and the room had been paid for. If you told this story a hundred years ago, people would say I had met fairies. These two fairies taught me a lot about friendship and love: one was taking the other on a trip to cheer him up because his wife had just passed away — and about kindness.

Luck is the payoff for effort.

In the entire Alex Ferguson book, the word "luck" is not mentioned even once. Across his whole career, "Fergie Time" is the name given to relentless effort, refusing to quit until the last second. I figure every time I finally pull something off after a grind, I should say, "It's Fergie Time!"