Good morning and welcome to the Increase Your Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 2083. I'm reading a book called Poor Charlie's Almanac right now by compiled by Peter Kaufman. And I came across this sentence about deserving success. And it got me thinking about deserving success. And we hear that all the time.

Like, I deserve this. But the question I started to think about is, is do we actually deserve success?

I think sometimes we think about success as a transaction. If I put in the work, I get the reward. Simple, binary. This leads to that.

But I don't think that's the reality. In fact, I know that's not the reality. Success doesn't

always work that way in my experience in my experience in working with people in my own life.

The reality is that success doesn't

always come after hard work. We've all seen it. The person who grinds day after day

sometimes doesn't quite get the break and get the success that they want. The team that does

everything right still comes up short and doesn't win the championship.

The competitor who seems to do the bare minimum, somehow they get what they deserve, even though

they don't work as hard. And that is extremely frustrating. And then it becomes easy to start believing

that success is unfair, that hard work should guarantee results.

But that is not how life works.

It isn't something we're owed.

Success is something that we earn.

It's not necessarily something that we earn.

It's something that we position ourselves for.

We can increase the probability of it, but we're never entitled to success. So instead of asking

ourselves, do I deserve success? It might be more accurate and beneficial to ask ourselves,

have I done the work that success requires? Or have I done the work

that increases the probability of success? And not just the visible work, but the unseen work,

the uncelebrated work, the work that nobody else sees you doing. Asking yourself, have I prepared so well that when the opportunity comes i'm not just

...