“A surprising World Series moment shows that luck isn’t magic... it’s math in disguise.”
Last week, in the middle of what will go down as one of the longest and most dramatic World Series games in history — 18 innings, Dodgers vs. Blue Jays — something extraordinary happened.
Not on the field. On live television.
As the game hung in the balance, with the pitcher frozen mid-windup, Fox suddenly cut away from the action. Viewers blinked. The crowd gasped. And then... there I was.
A 72SOLD commercial, smack in the middle of a pitch.
No fade-in. No warning. Just me, talking about how we’ll sell your home at your price in 30 days or less, or buy it ourselves, with a full market value guarantee.
Fifteen seconds later, the feed snapped back to the field.
Same score. Same tension.
But America had just watched one of the most talked-about “mistakes” in World Series broadcast history.
Our website traffic exploded. Social media lit up. “Did Fox just cut to a real estate ad in extra innings?”
It was a marketer’s dream, and our competitors said we got “lucky.”
But here’s the question that inspired this article: What is luck, really?
Most people think luck is the invisible hand that picks favorites. You step in a puddle... bad luck. You find twenty dollars... good luck. You buy a stock that doubles... great luck.
But what if luck isn’t chance at all?
What if it’s probability influenced, tilted, nudged by what you do, how you think, and the choices you make?
That “lucky” World Series moment (see it below), only happened because we’d spent years building a partnership with Fox. Because we had invested in seven commercials during that particular game, more than any Arizona company in history. Because we showed up.
Had we not done all that, the broadcast glitch would’ve skipped right past us and landed on a truck commercial.
So yes, it was luck. But it was earned luck.
The same principle applies to almost everything in life, even sports betting where fortune seems to rule.
Imagine you’re betting $100 on a few NFL games for fun. Most people pick based on gut feeling... team loyalty, favorite quarterback, a hunch from a headline. That’s gambling.
But what if, before placing your bet, you checked the “smart money,” where professional bettors and statistical models say the value is? Tools like Perplexity AI can aggregate that data in seconds. Suddenly, you’ve increased your odds. You haven’t guaranteed a win, but you’ve leveraged information, reduced emotion, and raised your probability of getting “lucky.”
Luck, in that sense, isn’t magic. It’s math in disguise.
It’s what happens when you replace emotional decisions with informed ones.
When you work a little harder. Think a little deeper. Prepare a little longer.
The more edges you stack in your favor, the more often fortune finds you.
I’ve seen it repeatedly in business. The agents who “get lucky” with more listings are the ones who make more calls, follow up more consistently, and learn what sellers truly value. The entrepreneurs who “get breaks” are the ones who stay in the game long enough for opportunity to collide with readiness.
That’s the secret about luck most people miss:
You don’t chase it, you create it.
The longer you prepare, the more you learn, the more you risk, the more times you swing… the more likely one of those swings lands in the sweet spot of circumstance.
And when it does, when a network glitch drops your commercial into the middle of a World Series pitch, people will say you’re lucky.
They’ll be right.
But what they won’t see are the years of deliberate choices that made that luck almost inevitable.
So, the next time someone tells you they had a “lucky break,” remember:
Good luck isn’t fortune smiling on fools.
Check out the Fox blooper that ran during the game...
