Finding Four-Leaf Clovers🍀
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When I was younger, I was mildly obsessed with four-leaf clovers.
They showed up in animations, cartoons, books and jewellery. Every now and then someone would mention that finding one meant you were lucky. I remember thinking how wonderful that must feel, to stumble across something so rare that the universe had apparently decided to hand you a tiny gift.
I wanted one desperately.
I even entertained the idea of looking for one until reality gently reminded me that I grew up in Lagos. Where exactly was I supposed to find a meadow? The closest thing I had were football fields and, as it turns out, those are very different ecosystems. So my four-leaf clover hunt ended before it ever really began.
Looking back, I think that was my first definition of luck.
Luck was the thing you found. It was rare, unexpected and spectacular.
You either found the four-leaf clover or you didn’t. Simple. Children are wonderfully uncomplicated like that. Adults, on the other hand, have a habit of making everything far more interesting.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I’d started questioning what actually counts as luck. For most of my life, I’d only recognised one version of it: the visible, onwards-and-upwards kind. The scholarship. The dream job. The opportunity that changes everything overnight. The right person appearing at exactly the right moment.
I ended that piece by saying I wanted to sit with the question a little longer because I had a feeling I’d overlooked entire ways that luck shows up in our lives.
Catch up on the previous article below:
As it turns out, every rabbit hole I’ve ever fallen into has taught me the same lesson: answering one question usually leaves me with three more. The more I thought about luck, the more I realised it wasn’t that luck was bigger than I’d imagined. I’d been looking at it from the wrong angle.
I’ve sat with it and come to realise that luck has never been one thing. The more I looked, the more I realised luck doesn’t just arrive in one dramatic moment. It moves through our lives in different ways. Maybe luck has always been multilingual. I’d just been fluent in only one of its languages.
Sometimes you’re simply born into it.
Not necessarily into money, although that certainly counts. Sometimes you’re born into a family that makes failure feel safe instead of shameful. Or into parents who love each other well enough that home feels peaceful. Or into extraordinary health. Or into a country with opportunities someone else can only dream about.
You didn’t earn any of those things. They arrived before you did. Some shape the entire direction of your life without ever looking extraordinary.
Sometimes luck is something another person creates for you.
Sometimes luck is an outstretched hand:
A teacher who notices something in you before you do.
A manager who decides to mentor you instead of merely supervise you.
A sibling who becomes your safest place in the world.
A friend who introduces you to someone who changes the direction of your life.
A parent who gives you permission to become yourself.
None of those people had to make those choices. Yet one decision from them can permanently alter someone else’s life.
Sometimes luck is something you slowly build.
From the outside, it rarely looks that way. Someone finally lands the job everybody wants or gets into the prestigious company everyone dreams about.
People smile and say, “You’re so lucky.”
What nobody sees are the hundreds of applications that came before it. The skills they kept building when nobody was watching. The evenings spent learning something new. The conversations they started. The risks they took. The moments they kept showing up after rejection made staying home feel much easier.
Eventually an opportunity appears and people call them lucky. Maybe they are but the truth is they’ve also spent years making it easier for luck to find them.
It reminds me of a farmer. When harvest season arrives and one field produces abundantly, it’s easy to look at the overflowing baskets and call it luck. What you don’t see are the months of preparing the soil, planting the seeds, watering consistently, pulling weeds, protecting the crops and showing up every single day before there was anything visible to harvest.
The harvest may arrive all at once but the conditions for it didn’t.
Maybe that’s what building luck really is. Preparing the ground so thoroughly that when opportunity finally arrives, it has somewhere to land.
Then there’s another kind of luck. The kind that’s simply... you.
Some gifts seem so ordinary that we mistake them for normal. The brain that instinctively understands language. The person who naturally remembers faces. The person who naturally puts other people at ease. The person who can explain complicated things simply. The child who picks up music almost immediately. The person whose instinct is to notice patterns everyone else misses.
We assume everyone finds them just as easy because we’ve never known what it’s like to live without them.
Then another pattern emerged
Once I noticed these different ways luck moves through our lives, something else became impossible to ignore. They don’t stay in separate lanes. They interact and compound. One kind of luck quietly changes the probability of another.
One grows up in a home where books are everywhere. Reading isn’t treated as homework; it’s simply part of everyday life. Questions about words are welcomed. Curiosity is encouraged instead of hurried along. Years later, people describe them as “naturally articulate.” They’re looking at the final domino and not the thousands of tiny moments that pushed it there.
Look at another child whose parents don’t simply tell them what to think. They ask what they think. They ask for their opinions. Their parents don’t immediately jump in with the answer or finish every sentence for them. They give them space to think, explain themselves and sometimes arrive at their own conclusions. They encourage other adults to genuinely speak with them too, not just speak at them. They grow up learning that their voice matters. They become comfortable expressing themselves, comfortable asking questions, comfortable talking to adults without shrinking into themselves. Years later, they walk into an interview and seem effortlessly confident. People point to the interview and not the childhood conversations that had countless rehearsals.
Or take a third child. Growing up somewhere that never punished curiosity. “Why?” wasn’t seen as talking back. It was treated as the beginning of a conversation. Years later, people describe you as naturally curious. They think it’s your personality. They don’t see the environment that taught you questions were worth asking. When I was younger, I used to pester my mum about the meanings of certain words and she would tell me to find it in a dictionary by myself. That one choice not to just give me answers sent me down rabbit holes. Words led to etymology, etymology led to history, history led to mythology and about fifteen other paths I hadn’t intended to follow. Maybe she didn’t realize she was teaching me how to be curious but that seemingly small choice probably shaped more about how I approach curiosity than any formal education did.
None of these examples guarantee an outcome. Life is far too messy for that but they change the odds. They make certain futures more likely than they otherwise would have been. By the time everyone notices the last domino, they’re often looking at years of invisible advantages, choices, relationships and circumstances quietly working together.
Of course, none of us gets every version of luck. Some people begin life carrying extraordinary advantages; others begin by carrying extraordinary burdens. Most of us inherit some mixture of both.
That’s the part I completely missed as a child.
I used to think luck was one spectacular event. Now I think it’s much closer to a web. Some strands you’re born onto. Some are woven by other people. Some you spend years weaving yourself. Some have always been part of who you are.
Most of us don’t just have one. We carry several at once. Maybe that’s why luck is so easy to misunderstand. We’re usually staring at the brightest thread while overlooking the hundreds holding everything else together.
As an adult, now I know that maybe finding four-leaf clovers was never about searching harder. Maybe it was about finally seeing that luck has been growing everywhere: in the people who chose to nurture me, in the quiet gifts I was born with, in the years I kept showing up, in the web of invisible advantages I’m only now learning to recognize.
Maybe I was never looking for the wrong thing. I was just looking in the wrong places.
Although, if I’m honest, I think I’ve stumbled into yet another rabbit hole. It turns out that recognising the many forms of luck is one thing. Learning to recognise your own might be something else entirely.
See you in two weeks 💜