Midlife MavericksCalling a woman’s work “luck” is the politest way to deny her effort.
If you’re a woman, you’ve heard it: “You’re so lucky.”
On the surface it sounds like a compliment. In practice, almost always, what they’re really telling you isn’t about luck. It’s about invisible work nobody saw, that someone decided to rebrand as “luck.”
Last week I was in Dubai, working at a pace nobody would envy. Five days of meetings and calls packed into a tight calendar. In one of the rare gaps, a friend dragged me to a café and took a photo. It was the only free hour I had all week. The picture hit social media and the comments arrived in seconds. There it was: “Wow, lucky you!!!”
Lucky how, exactly.
Few things wind me up faster than this. Ask my husband, he’ll tell you I lose my mind about thirty times a day. But this piece isn’t about hormones. It’s about what nobody sees.
It’s also almost always other women, not men, who feel the need to remind me how lucky I am that, in 2025, my husband takes the kids to school, cooks, or stays alone with them for four days without me leaving a list of ten thousand instructions. The narrative is familiar. I’m “lucky” he “helps.” What rarely makes it into that sentence are the years of conversation, the negotiations, the redivision of the load, the learning together. And the simple fact that none of it was luck. It was choice. It was work. And he was, for the record, hand-picked.
That’s why I started taking this idea of luck more seriously.
I’m not ungrateful. I’m fully aware of the luck I had at the start. I was born in Portugal in 1976, in peacetime. I had access to free public school and a national health service. Above all, I had parents who never tied my potential to my gender and who backed me unconditionally in everything. None of that was my doing. That was pure chance. I did nothing to deserve that starting point.
Calling what came after “luck” is a different conversation.
What I built in my career and my personal life didn’t fall out of the sky. It cost sleepless nights and a lot of early mornings. It cost months of billing zero and still showing up the next day. It cost taking on clients who weren’t ideal but who guaranteed recurring revenue. It cost difficult decisions, discipline, the patience of a long game. People look at the result and call it luck. They ignore the path.
I’ll say it without dressing it up. Luck didn’t build my business or my life. I did.
Yes, there were good moments. Specific opportunities. People who showed up at the right time. But they didn’t arrive in a golden envelope. They arrived disguised as shaky first steps, uncomfortable meetings, emails sent without guarantees. I had to break a lot of stone to get here.
This is where the idea almost nobody likes to hear comes in. Luck counts, but it isn’t magic. It isn’t completely random. And it can be, up to a point, built.
A lot of us grew up with the classic script. Work hard. Don’t ask for too much. Don’t make waves. When something goes well, we shrink. We say “I got lucky” the way someone apologises for ending up where they ended up. A kind of pre-emptive discount. If something goes wrong next, at least we hadn’t claimed any credit.
Except, in most cases, it wasn’t luck. It was you. You being consistent when nobody was watching. You taking rejections without quitting. You putting yourself in rooms where things happen. You walking into rooms you didn’t feel ready for and staying anyway. Nobody saw you rowing against the current. But the moment you arrive, everyone notices. From the outside, it looks like luck. From the inside, it’s strategy and graft.
Psychology has something to say about this. The British psychologist Richard Wiseman spent over ten years studying people who considered themselves “lucky” or “unlucky.” His conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone who believes everything depends on chakra alignment. Lucky people aren’t blessed. They behave in ways that create more opportunities, spot them faster, and recover quicker from failures.
Wiseman identifies four traits that show up over and over. People who feel lucky tend to maximise chance opportunities. They talk to strangers, expand their network, don’t close doors before they have to. They don’t hide. So they bump into more opportunities and they act on them. They trust intuition more. When something feels right, they move, while others keep “analysing it a bit more” and end up stuck. They’re generally more optimistic. Someone who believes things might go well takes more shots. More shots means more failures, sure, but also more wins. It isn’t mysticism. It’s maths.
The fourth one is the one most people miss. Lucky people turn bad luck into raw material. A failed launch, a rejected proposal, a client who disappears aren’t seen as proof of incompetence. They’re seen as data. Information to feed into the next try. They adjust, refine, get back in the game. They’re not lucky because everything goes well for them. They’re lucky because almost nothing can knock them out of the game. At root, the difference between someone who calls herself lucky and someone who calls herself unlucky is rarely talent. It’s behaviour and resilience.
Which raises an unavoidable question. If luck is so much about behaviour, can we actually make ourselves “luckier” in our working lives. The answer, for me, is yes, within the limits of the context we inherited. We don’t control the country we were born in, the family we got, the year, our health. But we do control how we expose ourselves, how we read what happens to us, and how we get back up.
In practice, increasing that “luck” comes down to three moves. Expand exposure. Be in more rooms. Have more conversations. Say yes more often to the opportunities that scare you a bit. Luck doesn’t find people who stay permanently hidden.
Spot patterns. When you look back and identify moments when luck seemed to be on your side, you almost always see behaviours that preceded them. A period of higher visibility. A request for a referral. An email that cost you to send. Those conditions can be replicated deliberately.
Work on your recovery rate. Every rejection can be a full stop or a comma mid-sentence. When you swap “I failed” for “what did this teach me” and “where is this redirecting me,” you shorten the time between falling and standing back up. And the faster you get back in the game, the more “luck” you appear to have.
There’s a line attributed to half the famous people in history: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
It isn’t a defence of blind sacrifice. It’s a reminder that, in most cases, what we call luck is just the visible side of a whole set of choices, doggedness, and attempts that stayed offstage.
The world isn’t fair. It doesn’t hand out opportunities evenly. But it does tend to reward the people who live as if the next opportunity is right around the corner. And who prepare for it. Instead of waiting for it to drop from the sky.
So next time someone tells you “you’re so lucky,” remember this. Often, what that person is really saying is: “I have no idea what it cost you to get here.” But you know. And that’s enough.
Because at the end of it all, luck takes me a hell of a lot of work.
Comment below. What’s the most insulting “you’re so lucky” you’ve ever heard, and what did it really cost you to get there? I read every response.
This article was first published in Portuguese in my weekly column Oh pá, não me lixem! for Executiva.
