It seems incredible that, 21 years after the publication of Good luck, the business fable that, written with Álex Rovira, went around the world and brought us into the publishing world, still has something to add regarding the luck factor. The topic comes from the film The Snow Society. The tragedy of the Andes, told in a fascinating way in the book ¡Viven! by writer Piers Paul Read and recreated with stunning realism by J.A. Bayonne. Some of the survivors, who had already given countless lectures about the lessons learned from their story of survival, improvement, teamwork and leadership, have returned to the stage again with more strength, boosted by the success of the film.
Each of the then young university students and rugby players who have decided to explain their experiences highlights or emphasizes a certain factor. I personally met Nando Parrado when I met him at an event where we were both giving, separately, a conference to business professionals. His lecture was fascinating. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the rest. The fact is that, recently asking a manager who heard Nando Parrado speak a couple of months ago, he told me that one of the things he explained was the importance of luck. “I was in a certain row of the plane. The aircraft broke up in the next row. “If I had sat one row further back, I would be dead.” “The bruise on my head dissolved thanks to the cold. In another latitude he would have died.” “If we had taken the wrong direction when we started walking, we wouldn’t have gotten there.” And he said: “It was luck.” It seemed to me an impressive exercise of humility in a person who was left for dead by his companions, who recovered, who exercised decisive leadership in salvation and who decided, in a desire to improve and demonstrate the strength of the human spirit. How after his feat, walking without resources through peaks where only experienced, well-equipped mountaineers descend, hungry, at the limit of his strength, chilled from the cold and with hardly any defenses, can he still say: “I was lucky”?
I think it’s a way of recognizing that not everything depends on us. In the book Good Luck we defend that luck accompanies us when we create the circumstances for things to happen. Human action reduces uncertainty. It is true that it does not completely cancel it. I think that Nando Parrado, immense, is not telling us that feats are useless. But, despite trying our best, let us not lose humility because, despite everything we can do, luck may not be on our side.
