If you want to know the truth, you must put the work in to discover it.
Most people don’t put the effort in to discover the truth. They simply accept what other people tell them as the “truth”. They trust their source, often without questioning it at all. But where did their source get their information from?
It’s cheap to pump out unfounded nonsense, based on nothing. Banality and bullshit costs nothing to create. The fact that the truth costs is one of the main reasons why the internet is awash with so much distortion, fake news and deceit. It’s why AI easily hallucinates, when asked tricky questions, because its training datasets are contaminated with disinformation.
The key question is how many steps removed from the original raw data we, or our sources, actually are.
The further we are from the original data, the greater the chances of distortion or misinterpretation. If we’re too many steps away from the raw data, it’s safe to assume that we’re miles away from the truth and possibly talking absolute nonsense.
In contrast, if we speak directly to the person that did the original research, or the initial thinking, or we’ve personally invested thousands of hours in reading the research, in any field, then we’re likely to get much closer to the truth.
If we’re relying on the extremely polluted information ecology of social media, we’re almost certainly going to be profoundly misinformed.
Now, imagine speaking to someone who’s personally read the original works of all the great philosophers, all the great spiritual teachers and all the great psychologists. Someone who, unlike AI, which makes connections based on volumes of potentially inaccurate tokenised data with very little sense of meaning or the ability to see which connections actually matter, has spent a lifetime working out which connections matter and which don’t. You’d trust someone who’s read the source work more than most. Ken Wilber is such a person. Some years ago, Ken told a story about Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-born British polymath who wrote about the Ghost in the Machine in 1967 and described the “holons” in the Universe.
Wilber reflected on this and suggested that there were two basic schools of thought as to why things happen. He said that the first school claims that there’s no real explanation for why anything happens. Their answer suggests things happen by luck, chance, the randomness of the universe, kismet, or the fickle finger of fate. This explanation he called the “Philosophy of Oops”.
Then there’s a second school, which contains all the great philosophers, spiritual teachers and psychologists that have ever existed. Now they disagree about almost everything. But there’s one thing every single one of these luminaries agrees on.
And that is: “It ain’t oops”.
They all believe “there’s something going on”. The universe is not accidental or random; things don’t just happen by chance. All these great thinkers have a different explanation for what is going on. They may advocate for different spiritual, psychological, or philosophical explanations. They suggest there are deeper, wider patterns or an order to the universe, an evolving intelligence.
But they never, ever, advocate for oops.
In every boardroom in the world, you hear leaders say: "We were unlucky."
The launch flopped because of "unlucky timing." The acquisition soured because of "an unlucky market shift." The star hire didn't work out. The explanation given is: "you win some, you lose some." No further inquiry.
It's one of the most comfortable sentences in business.
It's also a lie we tell ourselves to avoid doing our homework.
This matters because "luck" isn't neutral.
Luck isn’t simply a gap in our knowledge, sitting there quietly waiting to be filled in.
It's a dangerous trapdoor. The moment you call something bad luck, you've closed the file. Nobody investigates bad luck. Nobody runs a root-cause analysis. You've converted a solvable problem into a mystical one, and mystical problems, conveniently, require nothing further from you.
I'm not arguing that we can control everything or explain everything. We manifestly don't and can’t.
Markets move for reasons. No single leader can see or sense the future. Pretending otherwise is its own kind of delusion. But there's a vast, under-examined territory between "fully in my control" and "cosmic randomness".
And in that gap nearly all of the interesting, useful, career-relevant material lives. Most of what gets filed under “bad luck” is just insufficient causal curiosity and a lack of due diligence.
Louis Pasteur, a man who understood a thing or two about invisible causes, put it best back in 1854: chance favours the prepared mind. He wasn't being poetic. He meant it almost literally. The people who look "lucky" are usually the people who did the unglamorous work of preparing, noticing, and understanding, long before the moment that made them look fortunate.
There's a rich psychology literature on why we default to “luck” and the “Philosophy of Oops” to explain what's going on. And it isn't very flattering.
Fritz Heider's attribution research described what psychologists now call the ‘self-serving bias’. This states that we routinely attribute our successes to skill and our failures to luck or circumstance. Watch a leadership team debrief a great quarter and you'll hear about their strategy, their talent, their instincts. Watch the same team debrief a terrible one and you'll hear about the market, the weather, the competitor's unfair pricing. Same team, same brain, wildly different accounting depending on which way the number moved.
Ellen Langer's classic 1975 work on the "illusion of control" found the mirror-image error: we happily overclaim credit for outcomes we didn't influence at all, right up until something goes wrong, at which point control quietly becomes somebody else's job, or nobody's. And underneath both biases sits the uncomfortable truth that we prefer to believe the universe is random rather than admit we didn't do the analysis, ask the right questions, or notice the pattern before it was too late.
Richard Wiseman spent a decade studying people who described themselves as "lucky" or "unlucky". In his 2003 book The Luck Factor, he reported that those who were "lucky" weren't blessed by fate. They noticed more opportunities because they were more open to their environment, they acted on their hunches, and they persisted differently after setbacks. Luck, under a microscope, dissolved into behaviour.
Watch out for the ‘usual suspects’ of people we blame, or the ‘dog ate my homework’ excuses that people reach for, when the real reason for failure is closer to home. Here are six of the classics for your next post-mortem.
1. I got sick just before the biggest week of the year
Was it unlucky timing, or maybe you weren’t managing the pressure well enough to prevent a cortisol-driven immune impairment? Better emotional regulation may have prevented the dip in performance.
2. I keep losing my keys, missing appointments and having accidents this month
This isn't a curse on your household. It's simple overload and exhaustion. It’s not random. Your working memory predictably fails when you’re slogging through your most demanding cognitive stretches. Better energy regulation may have prevented the DIY lobotomy.
3. We kept hiring the wrong person
This is rarely bad luck. It’s usually a bad selection process, repeated. If the pattern recurs, the common variable isn't fate; it's your inability to assess the candidates properly. You might want to consider broadening your candidate assessment to include their strategic thinking, their appetite for change and their leadership maturity, rather than just focusing on technical and operational skills.
4. The project failed because of unforeseeable market shifts
Insularity is a predictor of failure. If you’re not perpetually sensing the subtle changes in market dynamics from talking to everybody, including your customers, then you’re too insulated from outside challenge to see the shift coming. The insularity is amplified by mistaking confidence for coverage. Open up, let people in, seek alternative views and fresh thinking.
5. My flight is often delayed, or the traffic always seems to conspire against me
You remember every delay vividly and forget every uneventful journey instantly. You are not cursed; you may simply be planning your travel poorly or not allowing for the unexpected. Try arriving early and working onsite until your appointment.
6. We lost the deal/game/pitch because of a bad break
A defeat triggers a cortisol spike, and one loss can easily become a vicious cycle or a downward spiral. Fortunately, one win can create the opposite: a virtuous cycle driven by rising DHEA hormone levels. Developing clarity and confidence to boost your DHEA levels is key. As one coach memorably put it: “We either win, or we learn. There is no defeat.”
Suggesting business outcomes are due to external, unexaminable forces is, developmentally speaking, the equivalent of suggesting "the gods were angry." Mature, sophisticated leaders default the other way. They take ownership for outcomes first and only resort to the Philosophy of Oops as a last resort. They see everything as an opportunity to learn and develop, and they’ve developed the humility to ask, "What actually happened here, and what part did I play in it?"
That single habit of mind, treating apparent randomness as an invitation to investigate rather than a licence to abdicate, is one of the more reliable markers separating leaders who accelerate their development year on year from leaders who keep re-living the same "unlucky quarter” on a loop.
Next time someone on your leadership team reaches for the word "luck", either claiming good luck or bad, don't let it pass. Ask the only question that matters:
If we assumed, for five more minutes, that this was explicable, what would we look for?
You'll stop making the failure a mystery you didn't bother to solve, and you’ll start understanding what is really going on and why.