It is a fundamental assumption of the Work Ethic that people ought to have goals and should struggle toward them in a straight line. We are counseled to fix our eyes on our goals, looking neither to the right nor to the left, refusing to be distracted. This is supposed to be the sure route to success.

But here is a puzzling fact. It turns out that lucky men and women, on the whole are not straight line strugglers. They not only permit themselves to be distracted, they invite distraction. Their lives are not straight lines but zigzags.

Goal orientation,  as they call it in Psychology 101, is undoubtedly a good thing in moderate doses. But the lives of the lucky seem to say you should be wary of overdoing it.

Look at Mary Garden, for example. She began her musical career by studying the violin. Then she switched to the piano. Then she took singing lessons. She attended some rehearsal of an opera in Paris and was in the opening-night audience, holding ticket number 113, when the star singer fell ill. Mary Grade was asked to fill in and a new star was born.

Later in her life, she talked about goal orientation as successful people do. “I never lost sight of what I wanted to do,” she claimed in her autobiography. But we would not know her name today if she hadn’t lost sight of it at least twice. If she had not zigzagged, she would have kept her eyes fixed on the goal of becoming a violinist. By her own admission, she would probably not have been a very good one.

Or look at Harlan Sanders. He bounced around the world like a Ping-Pong ball before finding his big break. He dropped out of school in the seventh grade, worked at various menial jobs, collected fares on a streetcar, piloted a ferryboat, sold insurance, then, went into the restaurant business. Largely by luck, he stumbled on a recipe and method for turning out unusually tasty friend chicken on a mass-production basis. Colonel Sanders’s Kentucky Friend Chicken quickly became a multi-million-dollar business.

Or take Ray Kroc. He, too, bounced around. A high school dropout, he started out with his eyes on the goal of a career in music. He played the piano in some traveling bands. Then he switched goals and made some money selling Florida real estate. Then music distracted him again, and he worked for a while as musical director of a radio station. A new selling opportunity distracted him next: He went on the road, selling paper cups. Another goal then loomed up to attract his roving gaze: the goal of having his own business. He set up a manufacturer’s representative, selling Multimixers-machines that mixed milk shakes.

And finally, after all that zigzagging, Ray Kroc hit the jackpot. One day, to his astonishment, he learned that a small California restaurant had eight of his Multimixers, far more than any other establishment. The restaurant was obviously doing a booming business. When his travels took him to the West coast, Kroc made it a point to stop in at the restaurant and see what the big attraction was.

The attraction was a peculiarly delicious new version of an old American staple: hamburger and French fries. The restaurant’s name was McDonald’s. Kroc knew a gold mine when he fell into one. He quickly formed a partnership with the two brothers who owned and operated the restaurant. Within a few years, under Kroc’s management, the name of McDonald’s was celebrated across the nation and then around the world.

But Kroc, too, talked about goal orientation in his elder-statesman years. At the so-called “Hamburger University” in Elk Grove, Illinois, where prospective  franchisees went to attend seminar dealing with the fast-food business, Kroc would often given solemn Work Ethic preachments about the necessity of keeping one’s eyes glued to one’s goal. His speeches sounded uncannily like those of another great zigzagger, Tom Watson, the founder of IBM. Watson, too, liked to harangue students in company operated schools. Except that Watson and Kroc wee talking about two different products, their speeches were interchangeable. Both men stressed the need to crunch one’s way through life in a straight line, never swerving, trampling down obstacles like bulldozer.

Of course part of Kroc’s motive in giving these speeches was that he didn’t want his students swerving to goals outside McDonald’s. But he seemed to genuinely believe that goal fixing is the route to success. Like Mary Garden, he appeared to forget that he owed his great good luck largely to the fact that he hadn’t plodded toward a single, fixed goal as a younger man.

If Mary Garden and Ray Kroc had both been straight-line plodders, they might have met at some gathering of down-at-the-heels musicians. We can imagine the scene: They are two aging losers. She is eking out a living by giving violin lessons to bored teenagers, while he plays a dispirited piano in a bad that hires itself out for dances and weddings, when it can get work at all.

“It’s a tough business Mary,” He says morosely.

“Yes, but look at it this way, Ray,” she says, trying to cheer him up. “No mater what happens, you’ve still got your music. That’s always been the important thing for me. Having a goal to work toward!”

“Yeah, right!” he says, cheering up. “A goal!”

“Not like so many of these aimless young people nowadays.”

“Right! Goals! We’ve got goals! Say, you don’t suppose you could lend me ten bucks to tide me over till next week, could you?”

The lucky, alert to the luck/planning distinction, are aware that life is always going to be a turbulent sea of opportunities drifting randomly past in all directions. If you put blinders on yourself so that you can see only straight ahead, you will miss nearly everything.

This is what the unlucky typically do. They stick to preplanned life routes even when they are going nowhere or are actually plodding downhill to disaster. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to sell paper ups. I’m a pianist!” Thus speaks a potential loser. “Oh, I’m not interested in any new venture, I’ve got my life pretty well planned.” Thus speaks another.

Long-range plans aren’t actually harmful, but it is important not to take them seriously. A plan can be used as a kind of guide into the future but should never be allowed to harden into a law. If something  better comes along, you should be ready to abandon your old plan immediately and without regret.

This is what the lucky are able to do. Typically, they do it without thinking about it much. As a breed, they instinctively avoid getting trapped in their own long-range plans.

“When I was younger,” Elizabeth Arden told a Fortune reporter, “People chided me for not sticking with jobs long enough. It’s a lucky thing I didn’t.”

It was indeed a lucky thing. She learned stenography and worked at that for a time. She held another job as a cashier. She worked as a dental assistant. At the age of thirty, she went to New York and got a job in a beauty salon. That was where, finally, she learned the trade that would make her famous.

Like Mary Garden and Ray Kroc, she became famous because she was willing to stay receptive to random bits of luck drifting past. She did not insist on plodding forward in a straight line. If something attractive bobbed up somewhere beside the trail she was travelling, she turned off the trail and started out in a new direction.

This doesn’t mean you should make frequent changes just for the sake of change itself. It means only that if a piece of potential good luck drifts your way, you should not summarily reject it simply because it doesn’t some predesigned plan.

If you do insist on following a plan, you are likely to end up playing the saddest game in the world – the game of “if only.” This is a game played largely by losers in moments of lonely gloom. Looking back, they can identify turning points at which they could have made themselves into winners. Could have – if only.

“If only I’d gone into business with my two friends”, lamented a middle-aged man one day at the New York Forty Plus Club. He was an industrial salesman specializing in computer software. That was the profession he had learned as a young starter, and it was the single track along which he had plodded throughout his career to date. The goal he had kept before him, in his words, was “to be the best damned software salesman in the business.” That certainly sounds like al laudable goal. It would be applauded by all good Work Ethic fans. However, it had never done this poor wayfarer the slightest bit of good. After a long string of bad breaks, his job disappeared in a merger, and he was out on the sidewalk at the age of fifty-five.

He need not have been. Years back, two friends had approached him with an appealing suggestion. They were in the very first stages of founding a licensing agency. This was an enterprise that proposed to earn its living by representing sports personalities, TV stars, and other famous names. It would promote the use of these names in manufactured products such as clothing and toys, collecting commissions from the licensing fees paid by the manufacturers. The licensing business appeared to be growing rapidly and the two entrepreneurs were able to paint a glowing picture in describing it to the computer man. They already had some business lined up, virtually guaranteeing a profitable first year for the infant enterprise. It was as nearly risk free as a new business can ever be. They wanted their friend, the computer man, to join them and take over certain marketing functions.

But he could not see in any direction but straight ahead. He was a software salesman, not a licensing agent, he protested. This new enterprise was off to one side of what he saw as his life’s main street. And so he turned the opportunity down. He rejected a piece of potentially excellent luck that had drifted within his reach – rejected it without even studying it.

The licensing agency prospered in the middle 1980s, as most such agencies did. The computer man, left behind, could only stand there and say “if only.”

Never take long-range plans seriously. Use them for general guidance as long as they seem to be taking you where you want to go, but whatever you do, don’t get stuck with them. Throw them in the trash heap as soon as something better comes along.

This approach or formula turns up again and again in the lives of the lucky. Most of them seem to follow it instinctively, without giving it much direct thought. They follow it because it feels right. But there are others who follow it in a more deliberate or cerebral way, as a thought-out philosophy.

An outstanding example is Helen von Damm, the United States ambassador to Austria through most of President Regan’s time in office. Mrs. von Damm’s astoundingly lucky life is an advertisement for the value of the zigzag path, and she is keenly aware of the fact. She has always avoided long-range goals as a matter of deliberate personal policy.

“I don’t belong to the people who make long-range plans,” she told a New York Times reporter in 1985. “I like to take advantage of serendipity.”

Serendipity, the faculty of habit of seizing lucky breaks that you weren’t looking for, is another way of describing the zigzag life route characteristic of lucky people. Helen von Damm’s life has been the opposite of a straight line.

She was born poor in Austria in 1938. Her home village was occupied by the Russians after World War II. She was only a school girl, but she understood quickly that life under the Soviets’ own gray version of the Work Ethic was not for her. She watched for a chance to get out, and when one came, she got out. She fled to West Germany with hardly a pfennig in her purse. She found a job, but when she met an American soldier who wanted to marry her, she abandoned career goals instantly. She married the soldier and moved to Detroit.

Eventually seeing other goals that attracted her more, she divorced the man. She found work, but then a more attractive secretarial job in Chicago caught her eye, so she moved there. The main attraction of the new job was hat it offered her a chance to circulate among interesting people instead of just sitting in a business office. The job was with a political-action committee of the American Medical Association.

In a short time she changed goals again. Her work for AMA put her in contact with an interesting man who had started adult life as an actor but now was zigzagging into politics. His name was Ronald Regan. He asked the energetic and capable secretary to follow him home to California and work on his gubernatorial campaign. Quickly abandoning long-range AMA goals, she agreed.

She became Ronald Regan’s personal secretary, worked on his presidential campaign and followed him into the White House. In 1982 he named her Ambassador to Austria the country she had fled as a penniless emigrant many years before.

A life story that reads like a fairy tale. A story of amazing good luck. But Cinderella would never have made it to her happy ending unless she had always been ready to abandon old goals for new ones.

Never be afraid to zigzag. Avoid wailing yourself into a category. “I’m a secretary…I’m in the computer business….I’m a Detroiter.” You never know which direction your lucky breaks may come from. When they drift into reach, grab them.