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You don't have to work hard to be successful, just be lucky.


561_devin 1 / -  
Feb 5, 2015   #1
Argument paper. That's all she said, she hasn't given a list of rules.

You don't have to work hard to be successful, just be lucky instead.

While some rely on luck to become successful, others work hard to accomplish their goals. There's no doubting that both hard work and luck play a big role in one's success, but I disagree with relying on luck alone to get you far in life. With enough hard work you will eventually become successful, whereas with luck there is no guarantee.

If you depend on luck, you will never get what you want in life. Many people see a successful person and automatically assume that they are just lucky; this isn't always the case. The main difference between a person who is considered successful and a person who is unsuccessful is similar to that of people who are considered lucky and unlucky, and that's that they are presented with different opportunities in life. In some cases, both lucky and unlucky people are presented with the same exact opportunity, only they react different to it. For example, in a study conducted by Richard Wiseman, professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. He gives both the "lucky" and the "unlucky" people a newspaper and asks them to look through it and count how many photographs they find. He found that on average the unlucky people took two minutes to count all the photographs, whereas the lucky ones determined the number in a few seconds. It turned out that the lucky people were able to do this because they found a message on the second page that read, "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." So why didn't the unlucky people see it? Because they were so focused on counting all the photographs that they missed the message. Wiseman says, "Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else."

People who work hard create their own luck. Like the Roman philosopher Seneca said, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity". In other words, luck isn't just about being at the right place at the right time, but also about being open to and ready for new opportunities. Although I believe successful hard working people have had some help with luck along the way, it wasn't luck alone that got them where they are today. According to Wiseman, people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles: they are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good. With that being said, successful people work hard to be as lucky as they appear to be, and the unlucky people who say that the only reason someone else is successful is due to them being lucky, simply don't understand the concept of what "being lucky" is really all about.

When an opportunity presents itself, you can either consider yourself lucky enough to catch it, or feel it happened because you've been working hard towards the moment. Either way, once you have an opportunity, you now have to work hard to turn the opportunity into a success. For example, after years of studying a field and working your degree, you are presented with the opportunity to start your dream job right out of the gate. This may be considered "lucky", but you are not going to be successful in your new career with luck, it's going to take hard work. You'll work hard until you become successful enough that other people consider you to be lucky. But it wasn't the luck, it was the hard work. There is cases where people are born into very rich families and don't have to work a day in their life, however someone had to work hard in order to create that opportunity.

In conclusion, luck alone is not what makes someone successful. It's the hard work put in and being skilled enough to spot the opportunities that will take you to success. Working hard for the rest of your life may not guarantee that you will become successful, however neither will sitting around hoping to get lucky.
vangiespen - / 4,134 1449  
Feb 5, 2015   #2
Even though you were not given a format for your paper, you should have used the default MLA formatting for this essay. I see that you have a number of quotations and references to the original source of the information in the essay, but you failed to give a proper citation for it. In all higher level academic papers, proper quotation of sources whether in-text or paraphrasing, must be properly noted or referred to within the text in order to give the essay a sense of validity. The in-text citation should include the author's name and original title of the work in quotation marks within a parenthesis.

About the content of your paper, you are supposed to argue both sides of the issue. However, you did not successfully do that. The feel of your essay instead comes across as a persuasive essay rather than an argument one. If you review what you wrote, you only discuss the "work hard" part of the argument in great detail. The "lucky" part is only a mention at the beginning, thus creating the persuasive point of view instead. If you revise the paper to discuss the "lucky" part in the same depth as the "work hard" you will be able to create a better argumentative paper.


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