How to create your own luck?

I've never had a five-year plan; yet I know I'm exactly on the right trajectory. Here's how.

I just want to start this post by addressing the fact that I have finally emptied my duffel bags after coming back home from Nepal. I’m feeling very accomplished about that. But now to the actual topic: creating our own luck…

I did a keynote speech a few days ago and was asked how much I usually need time to train for a specific mountain. The thing is I don’t have an answer for that. I barely ever train for a specific mountain. Instead, I choose my projects based on where I’m at in my training and in life. I don’t focus on the goal; I focus on the system. Let me elaborate a little.

My father, Aki Hintsa, was a doctor (he died of pancreatic cancer in 2016), and for a huge chunk of his career he worked in the Formula 1 and with a lot of other athletes who were world class in their field (he was, among other things, a doctor for the Olympic team in Finland). So oftentimes I’d come home from school, and we’d have some world champion sipping coffee at our dining table. Business as usual. And all these men and women were just regular people, like you and me. Of course, they were otherworldly fit as they have worked hard to excel at their craft, but the conversations and the encounters felt really normal, nothing out of the ordinary.

What made them so good at what they did, were their natural abilities combined with their desire to improve on themselves. They had a drive to become better at something they were already good at and where they wanted to see just how far they could push themselves. They weren’t doing something that the society, or their parents, or any outside voice had told them to get better at. It wasn’t about pleasing others nor even about competing with others. No matter how cliched it sounds, they were competing with themselves.

My father assisted a lot of these athletes in becoming the best versions of themselves and simultaneously tested his philosophy on how success is created. I’ll add a link (here) to the Hintsa Performance website so you can look more into the concept that he called the “Circle of Better Life”, but the basic idea is that if the six pieces of our health, placed in a form of a wheel, are not in balance, the wheel won’t turn smoothly. Those six pieces are: general health, physical activity, nutrition, sleep & recovery, biomechanics, and mental energy. In the midst of that is “the Core”.

To understand your Core, you need to be able to answer these three questions: do you know who you are? Do you know what you want? And are you in control of your life? And to be honest, I’ve built my current career on top of these three questions.

By understanding my “core” I’ve understood better what success means to me, I have a clear direction and a better plan of action, I don’t need to rely on my motivation to get things done, and I’m more willing to deal with discomfort.

So that’s my compass. Instead of locking in a five-year plan, I look for the clues for direction in who I am and what I want and then what can I do about it. For example, among other things, I’m curious, I love challenging myself, I’m good in altitude, I’ve naturally got great endurance, I love the nature and I’ve always craved adventures and excitement, I love problem solving, I’m a risk taker etc. So I will build on that. I will feed those qualities and I will improve them to the best of my abilities and to the extent that is in my control. And the arena I do it in? Mountains, but could be a lot of things. Other than the ability to adapt to altitude, these qualities are not mountain specific. Maybe I could’ve used these qualities to become a management consultant (my original plan after graduating business school) and then enjoyed nature and mountains on my free time. Or maybe I should’ve focused more on the entertainment industry. But what excites me the most at this point in life, is pushing myself in the mountains. Testing my own limits. And living a life of training as a full-time athlete, with a side of the entertainment industry. When the chips were in place to jump at the opportunity of climbing mountains for a living, I jumped at it. Because I knew who I was and that this was what I wanted. And what is in my control? Taking steps to become a better mountain athlete every single day.

And here we circle back to beginning of this post. We create our own luck. For me it means that every single day I take a step towards becoming a better version of myself. Sometimes it’s a big step, sometimes teeny-tiny and sometimes something in between. At this time in life, it’s related to who I want to be in the mountains so it’s about completing my workouts (between 15-30h/week) and intentionally resting, prepping expeditions, improving my technical skills and/or managing collaborations, sponsorships, and other sources of income like photoshoots and keynote speeches.

And even though I have no idea of what my next mountain will be, I know exactly the direction I’m heading and what I need to be doing to be able to climb that next mountain. And then when the opportunity presents itself, like when I left to climb Cholatse (technical, 6440m, Nepal) on a five-day notice, I’m ready. I’m strong enough, capable enough and prepared enough to go and climb that mountain, or maybe run that race or something as fun and adventurous. But I know this for a fact: the more I improve on the person who I am, the more I’ll end up doing the things I’m meant to do in this life. And it won’t always be all about mountains, there’s so much more in life we’ll stumble upon when we just get ourselves ready!

So today I challenge you to ask yourself these questions:

- Who am I? (character, values, roles, strengths, weaknesses…)

- What do I want? (what lights a fire in you, what is important to you, is this aligned with who you are?)

- Are you in control of your life? (are you proactively taking steps forward in a way that it is aligned with who you are and what you want, or is life just happening to you in a way where you feel out of control?)

Start from your “core” and things will flow from that :)

Xx, Lotta