We as Americans love to gamble. We love the long-shot underdog one-in-a-million victory. We love the sports movies with weak teams rallying, the spy movies with one man triumphing over entire armies of bad guys, the American Idol stories of a nobody exploding into a mega-star somebody. America, land of the free, land of opportunity, land of the lottery winners!

Real life functions a little differently.

Not to say the fantasy doesn't come true, or the long-shot big ticket huge chance won't appear. But see, behind all the overnight successes and huge swings in fortune are usually a million hours of work and prep and small mechanations that helped create the magical alignment of the stars.

It's been said a million ways, but I personally like the way my mom (who is awesome and knows plenty about moving to America and finding/building opportunities) puts it:

Opportunity = 7 parts hard work + 2 parts intuition + 1 part luck.

Opportunity is a bit like an iceberg. We only see and hear about the luck part, the big break part--the 10%. We don't see the 90% of the support and work that allowed and enabled that 10% to happen.

Working Hard

When I was little, I was in a few youth theatre shows with this one blonde girl. She was pretty talented, but more than that, she worked really hard. She loved acting and knew that was what she wanted. And when she turned 15, she gave her parents a PowerPoint presentation and convinced them to move out to LA so she could work and audition as an actor. It must've been one hell of a PowerPoint, because they did--she was home-schooled by her mom and they moved to LA.

We didn't hear much from her for a bit, then a few years later she was in a little movie called Superbad. And then The Rocker. And then Zombieland. And then headlining Easy A, then was in Crazy Stupid Love, The Help, and now is in the Spiderman reboot. Now I've taught kids who told me Emma Stone is their favorite actress, and I struggle to resist the urge to do a sleezy cheesy name drop about how we were in Oliver the Musical together.

I heard about all of this from the youth theater I worked at, and while it was exciting and encouraging to see a peer really make it big and have her "big break," most of the articles (and even friends from the youth theatre) seemed to gloss over the fact that she worked for years in bit parts and small roles before she hit her big successes. She put in her work, her training, and dedicated her life to what she wanted, and eventually, finally, she broke through.

Intuition

I recently read a fantastic article titled "How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet." Flickr, at the time of its inception, was the world's premier photo-sharing and networking site. Nowadays, photo-sharing and networking calls to mind another little company called Facebook. In the article, the author discusses how, when Yahoo bought Flickr, it didn't even see social networking as the primary asset of Flickr. Rather, Yahoo was interested in Flickr's image index--that is, the way Flickr had tagged and labeled photos which enabled easy searching.

Yahoo was presented with all the luck in the world of buying a precursor to one of the biggest futures of internet and web technology, but it didn't have the intuition to seize on it. (It shouldn't feel bad though, as even its chief competitor Google didn't have the right intuition of the importance of social media.)

Luck

Little known secret: you can make your own luck. Little talked about secret because it feels kind of icky: you can buy your own luck.

Let's venture back to the film acting world. Yes, if your family is in the business, you're going to have more luck and opportunities. Yes, if you have tons of money and your family can buy you an apartment and pay for your food and you can spend all your time auditioning, you're going to have more luck. Yes, if you can afford some expensive classes that allow you to meet talent agents and managers, you will have greater luck. And yes, if you can afford grad school (whether out of pocket or through mountains of debt that will crush your soul later...), that will give you some bonus luck too.

But ultimately, buying luck is not so much loading a die to always come up 7's, but rather purchasing additional balls to throw at the milk jugs at the state fair game. If you don't have a strong arm, a bit of practice and an intuition for the weak spot in the set up, you're still not going to knock down all the jugs and win the big prize.

Big Breaks, Big Works

We like to read about the Oscars and the Tonys and the Pulitzer Prizes, but often fail to remember or mention the endless work it took to get there. We love to laud the achievements and awards, but forget that they aren't the end goal but merely a result of shooting for great work and great art.

When I look at the amazing accomplishments of friends, mentors and artists that I admire, I try to remind myself to be humble and focus on the small steps and the hard work. Without 7 parts of hard work, even if opportunities were crammed down my throat, I wouldn't have the talent and skills to seize it. Without the intuition to seize great chances that come along, I can work myself to death in a dead-end route.

We can't wait for the planets to align. We gotta stop this space ship, get out, and push--and hope we've intuitively picked the right direction to push, and that we get lucky and don't get hit by space debris and burnt to a crisp.

(...I think I've over-extended my metaphors enough for one day.)