Welcome to Canada: Wanna Get Lucky? (CIM March) - Minto Roy
Featuring Career Development Expert Minto Roy
March is the month of St. Patrick’s Day in Canada and the U.S. Brought to North America by Irish immigrants, this originally introspective and religious holiday in Ireland has evolved here into a much more secular celebration of luck and good fortune. The sight of so many people of every ethnic background wearing shamrock green and glittering gold and sidling up to a bar to tilt a pint o’Guiness beer is enough to get anyone thinking about luck, and getting us thinking about how you can create your own.
Minto Roy Says:
I understand this luck research involved studying several hundred people who self-identified as either extremely lucky or extremely unlucky, monitoring their day-to-day lives and observing their responses to controlled experiments. Maybe the science is what will convince some of you, but not me. For me, it’s experience. I’ve always known that the more 14 hour days I put in grinding it out at the office, the luckier I get. The more I network and educate myself and do the right thing instead of the easy thing, the better my results turn out to be. You can call it luck if you want to. I call it a pattern of behaviour that, consistently implemented, has no choice but to succeed. You can’t do the right thing the right way in a consistent pattern and not get results. Hard work gets rewarded eventually.
As immigrants, sometimes you have to work harder than your Canadian-born counterparts and many people would say this is a hardship or an evidence of an uneven playing field. I think it’s actually lucky. Your hard work will give you drive and experience and new skills that people who have it easier will take much longer to develop – and they may never get there. I’m glad I started with next to nothing, growing up hard in a rough neighbourhood, hearing my parents slip out the door after putting us to bed to work graveyard shift in a factory. It made me hungry. It forced me to set goals and keep my commitments to myself even as a teenager. It continues to give meaning to what I am building every day.
If your life is hard right now, be glad. Bring it on! What you work for is so much richer than what is handed to you. That’s why immigrants are the luckiest people I know.
Minto Roy
President
CareersToday Canada
www.careerstodaycanada.com
www.mintoroy.net