Good Luck: Creating the Conditions for Success in Life and Business is a short fable by Álex Rovira Celma and Fernando Trías de Bes, two Spanish authors and marketing consultants. It came out in 2004, it has sold millions of copies, and it has been translated into more than forty languages. You can read it in one sitting.
The story
Merlin calls the knights together and gives them news. In seven nights a magic four leaf clover will be born somewhere in the Enchanted Forest, and whoever holds it will have unlimited good luck.
The forest is enormous and the clover is tiny. Most of the knights decide it is a needle in a haystack and go home. Two of them ride out anyway: Nott, the knight in black, and Sid, the knight in white.
They ask the creatures of the forest the same question: where will the clover grow? They get the same answer, that clovers have never grown here.
Nott takes that as the end of the matter. He spends his seven days more and more bitter, waiting for luck to prove everyone wrong.
Sid hears the same answer and asks a second question: what would a clover need in order to grow here? It would need fresh soil, water, sunlight, and ground with no stones in it. So he picks one small patch and spends his days getting it ready. He brings in new earth, leads water to it, cuts back the branches that block the sun, and clears the stones. Nobody has promised him the clover will choose his patch.
On the seventh night the seeds come down. They fall on the whole forest, on Nott as much as on Sid. They take root in one place only, the patch that was ready for them.
Luck and good luck
The book separates two things that usually share one name. Luck is what happens to you. It arrives by chance and it leaves the same way. Good luck is what happens when chance lands on ground you prepared. The seeds fall on everybody, so opportunity is common and prepared ground is rare.
What stands out is how little Sid knew. He had no idea where the clover would appear. He worked on the one part that was his, and when the seeds fell, his patch was the only one that could hold them.
Where the Tzolkin comes in
The knights were given one thing that most of us never get: a date. Merlin told them seven nights, so Sid could plan his work around how long he had.
Most of us prepare without a calendar. We work hard in weeks that were made for resting, and we wait in weeks that were made for starting.
The Tzolkin is a count of 260 days that comes from the Maya. Every day in it pairs one of 20 Seals with one of 13 Tones, so each day has a character of its own. The day you were born is your Kin. From there, the count gives your days a shape: stretches of 13 days with one theme running through them, days that favour starting something, days for deciding, days for finishing, days for letting go.
The Tzolkin leaves the work to you, as the fable does. What it adds is the calendar. It tells you what kind of day you are standing in, so you can tell whether today is for turning the soil, clearing the stones, or planting.
Sid made his good luck by getting ready before the seeds fell. Knowing your days is one way to know what to get ready, and when.
If you want to see yours, type your birthday on the home page. Finding your Kin is free and takes a few seconds.