What Gives Results - Luck or Effort?

Is it luck or effort that leads to success?

We often assume Sanatana Dharma promotes destiny — that everything is pre-written, that one's fate is sealed in the stars or inked in the lines of a palm.

But that’s not what the Mahabharata teaches.

Yudhishthira once asked Bhishmacharya this very question. And the answer Bhishma gave — glows with the clarity of fire.

First, let’s ask — what is luck?

Is it random? A fluke?
No.

जन्मान्तरकृतं कर्म तद्दैवमिति कथ्यते
What you call luck is nothing but the fruit of karma from past births.

You may have done Lakshmi Sadhana in a previous life and not seen its results then. That energy doesn’t disappear. It waits. It ripens. It arrives — maybe in this birth.

Bhishma gives a brilliant analogy:

• Luck is like seeds.

• Effort is like cultivation.

A farmer may hold a bag full of seeds — that’s luck.
But unless he sows them, waters them, protects them — will there be a harvest?

No.

Now suppose he works hard on barren land — effort with no seeds — will that yield a crop?

Again, no.

So both luck (past karma) and effort (present karma) are needed. But are they equal?

Bhishma says — absolutely not.

Effort is primary.
Luck is foundational.
Effort builds on top of it.
Without effort, luck stays dormant — like seeds in a sack.

Even the Devas, Bhishma says, attained Swargaloka not because it was written in their stars — but because they performed yajnas.

If Indra was born to be Indra, why did he perform a hundred Ashwamedha yajnas?

Because destiny opens only when effort knocks.

Let’s be real.

Take a hundred successful people.
How many got there without effort?
Hardly any.

Yes, luck helps.
But effortless success is rare, and lazy luck is short-lived.

And if effort ever fails, it’s not because effort is flawed — it’s because either it wasn’t the right kind of effort, or the karma from before still needs to ripen.

Effort is the charioteer. Luck is the wind behind. Not the other way around.

Your vasanas — your inclinations, tendencies, mindset — are the result of your past karmas.
If you’ve been a hard worker in past lives, you’ll carry that energy forward.
You’ll be driven.
You’ll find the right field.
You’ll get the chance to act — and you’ll take it.

Your actions today will decide the circumstances of your next birth.

Whether you’ll be born into royalty or poverty — isn’t chance.
It’s karma’s justice, playing out with silent precision.

And who better than Bhishma to point to the Pandavas?

They lost everything.

But they didn’t sit back waiting for luck to flip.
They fought.
They strategized.
They listened to Krishna’s guidance, not to use him as a crutch — but to walk their own path with clarity.

They won it all back, not through fate — but through action.

So finally, Bhishma declares:

Effort is like wind — it makes the fire of luck burn brighter.
But luck, too, can be the wind — if effort is already burning.

But between the two?

It is effort that moves the mountain.
It is effort that shapes the result.

Even luck waits for your will to rise.

Ramaswamy Sastry and Vighnesh Ghanapaathi