Machiavelli on fortune and luck
Describe your situation, or just name what is on your mind. You will get the exact passage from The Prince that speaks to it.
How much of a life is luck, and how much is yours to steer? Machiavelli's chapter on fortune is the closest The Prince comes to advice about the things you cannot command, and his answer is neither comforting nor fatalistic. It is a split, and a challenge. Type your situation above to find the line that fits.
Half is yours
Machiavelli's estimate is famous: fortune governs about half of what we do, and leaves the other half, more or less, to us. He offers it as a corrective to two errors at once, the despair that says nothing is in our hands and the arrogance that says everything is. The useful reading is the proportion. A great deal is out of your control, and a great deal is not, and confusing the two is its own failure.
Fortune hits the unprepared
He pictures fortune as a flood that tears through wherever no defenses were built, and spares the places that raised banks and barriers in calm weather. The point is that luck is not evenly cruel. It lands hardest on those who did nothing while they could. You cannot stop the river, but the time to build against it is before it rises, not during.
Change with the times
His last move is the hardest to live by. A careful, patient person succeeds while the times suit that temperament, he writes, and is ruined the moment the times change and he refuses to change with them. The trap is not having the wrong approach. It is keeping the approach that used to work after the conditions that rewarded it are gone.
Notable lines on fortune
Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.
So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valour has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and defences have not been raised to constrain her.
If, to one who governs himself with caution and patience, times and affairs converge in such a way that his administration is successful, his fortune is made; but if times and affairs change, he is ruined if he does not change his course of action.
Bring it to Machiavelli directly
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