NATILIE Moments
On Luck, Readiness, and the Moments That Change Everything
The Navigator's Ascent — Steve Morris
In 1983, Australia won the America's Cup for the first time in the race's 132-year history, ending the longest winning streak in international sporting competition and sending shockwaves through the sailing world that would ripple for years. Most people watched it as news and moved on. A few of us in New Zealand looked at it differently, we saw it as a signal, and we began to move.
Three years later, New Zealand entered the 1987 Cup campaign, which meant that, as a country, we needed to be figuring out a lot of the technical engineering behind fielding a high-performance yacht that could win against greater odds. That created a research program, and that research program drew me into a master's degree at the University of Auckland, deep in the technical work of sail aerodynamics, at the exact moment when New Zealand's sailing world was more electrified than it had ever been.
Then, in 1989, a man named Grant Dalton was assembling a crew and boat to race around the world, we got connected and he offered me a job. I said yes, and that single decision opened a door that 35 years of career has walked through.
Here's what I want you to see in that sequence:
1983: Australia wins the Cup - an event I had nothing to do with
1986: New Zealand enters - an event I didn't cause
1988: I'm doing a master's degree in sail aerodynamics - this one I caused
1989: Grant Dalton walks in - an event I didn't cause. My yes: that one I caused.
That sequence is what Jim Collins calls a chain of NATILIE moments: Not All Time In Life Is Equal, a concept from his new book What to Make of a Life, drawn from 12 years of research into how extraordinary people navigate the full arc of a life well lived.
Collins on Luck
Collins has a precise definition of luck, and it's worth sitting with. A luck event, by his definition, requires three conditions: you didn't cause it, it carries significant potential consequence, and it arrived as a surprise. By that standard, Australia winning the 1983 Cup was a luck event. Grant Dalton walking into my world in 1989 was a luck event. I didn't engineer either of them, and I couldn't have.
One key lesson I had picked up from working with Grant was the stance that you created your own luck by hard work. However, Collins’ research in Great by Choice produced a really interesting finding: the people who built extraordinary companies and lives did not get more good luck than their less-successful counterparts. The distribution of luck events, good and bad, was roughly equal across the matched pairs he studied across years of history. What separated the high performers from everyone else was their return on luck. When luck arrived, they made more of it. When unequal moments appeared, they recognized them and responded with unequal intensity.
"Not all time in life is equal. When you recognize an unequal moment, it requires an unequal response." — Jim Collins
So, while I can get with Collins' research results, I want to push on his definition in one important place. He says luck is something you didn't cause, but I think that framing is incomplete as a life strategy, because while you genuinely cannot cause the luck event itself, you can cause the self that luck lands on.
Australia winning in 1983 meant nothing to an engineer who wasn't paying attention to the sailing world. New Zealand entering in 1986 meant nothing to a student not doing deep technical work in a field that suddenly mattered. Grant Dalton walking in meant nothing to someone who hadn't done the work to be worth hiring. The luck event found me because I was positioned, through years of specific, serious preparation, in exactly the right place to receive it. You don't make your luck. But you absolutely build the person that luck can find.
Balance Is Not a Steady State
Most people think of balance as a kind of equilibrium, a stable, reliable distribution of energy and attention across the domains of life, work and rest held in comfortable proportion day after day. As a designer of constantly moving, yet still balanced sailing yachts, I want to suggest that the stable model is not only wrong but quietly costly, because it treats all time as roughly equal when the whole point of NATILIE thinking is that it isn't.
In life, business and sailing, real balance is dynamic, and it moves in seasons. There are times when the moment demands everything, when leaning in fully, protecting nothing, going all in is exactly the right response to what's in front of you. And there are times when the essential work is to pull back, recover, survey the terrain, and build the capacity that the next demanding moment will require. The error isn't leaning in hard when the moment calls for it. The error is, more commonly, failing to recognize when a lean-in moment has actually arrived and treating it as ordinary time.
Collins observed that the people in his study who got the highest return on luck were the ones who could recognize an unequal moment and respond with unequal intensity, which sounds straightforward until you realize how much that capacity depends on what you've built in the quieter seasons between. The ability to shift gears deliberately, to move from recovery into full commitment when the signal appears, is not something you manufacture in the moment itself — it's something you develop over time, in the work you do when no one is watching and no luck event is visible on the horizon.
Frankly, this is the point that people miss when they default to waiting for the “perfect” moment, when somehow they think they are going to be less busy in the future, and they fail to prepare.
What I have learned and what I see with my clients is showing up and doing The Work actually matters, not because hard work is inherently virtuous, but because when the NATILIE moment arrives and you haven't been doing it, when you haven't been building the skills, the relationships, the reputation, the depth of preparation, the luck event passes through you like light through glass. It lands on nothing. Nothing catches.
Three Things That Make Luck Land
Surface area. Collins uses this phrase “increasing the surface area for luck” and it points to something practical and actionable. You cannot engineer “who” luck: the right person walking into your world at the right time with the right offer. But you can be in environments where that kind of luck is more probable, doing work that puts you in rooms and conversations and networks where luck events are more likely to occur and more likely to find you. I was in Auckland doing graduate research on sail aerodynamics in the late 1980s, and that was a deliberate choice that placed me in direct proximity to the sailing world at the exact moment it was most alive. The surface area was large, and the luck found it.
Recognition. Luck events don't arrive with a fanfare. They often come quietly, dressed as an ordinary opportunity, easy to assess as routine and move past. The NATILIE skill, which is genuinely developable, not a fixed trait you either have or don't, is the capacity to recognize when what's in front of you is not an ordinary moment but a door, and to feel the difference between a temptation to be resisted and an opportunity to be seized. Collins found that the extraordinary people in his study had an unusual capacity for this kind of recognition, not because they were clairvoyant but because they were paying close attention to what lit up inside them when the moment appeared. Recognize the “Hell, Yes” moments!
Readiness. This is the one Collins leaves partly unspoken, and it's the piece I want to name directly. When the NATILIE moment arrives, you have to be able to say yes and mean it, not try, not hedge, not commit with one foot still pointed toward the exit. Collins's mentor Irv Grousbeck told him something that has stayed with me: an option to come back has negative value on a creative path, because knowing you can retreat changes the quality of your commitment before you even begin. In EOS we call this “burning the boats”. The people who got the highest return on their NATILIE moments were the ones who could go all in without a safety net, because they had done enough preparation to trust themselves under pressure when it mattered.
Grant Dalton didn't offer me a job because I happened to be available. He offered me a job because I was ready, because the years of technical work I'd done made me someone worth the offer. The luck event and the preparation arrived in the same moment, recognized each other, and produced a result that neither could have produced alone. That intersection is what a NATILIE moment actually is. My life’s trajectory was fundamentally changed forever.
Your Turn
Which brings me to the question I want to leave you with, because it's more useful than any framework.
What NATILIE moment is currently in front of you, what unequal moment that you may be treating as ordinary time? If that moment demanded everything tomorrow, if it required a full lean-in and no safety net, would you be positioned to say yes and mean it? Or have you been in a recovery season so long that you've stopped watching for the signal?
You don't have to manufacture the luck. You don't have to force the moment. What you have to do is create the stance in the self that luck can find, the depth of preparation, the breadth of surface area, the quality of attention, and then be genuinely, fully present when the unequal moment arrives.
The moment will come. The only question is whether you'll be ready when it does.
Email me - Let me know, I will read every message.
SWEET EARTH ORCHARD UPDATE
Spring has arrived on the farm here in Hygiene, and the land is doing what land does, reminding us that we are guests here, not the ones in charge. It's been a dry, warm winter, the spring rains haven't come, and the orchard is waiting alongside us in a kind of patient suspension. What this means for the summer ahead, we're still reading.
Two weeks ago, water appeared in the irrigation ditch early, and that was my own NATILIE moment. I dropped everything, pulled the winterized irrigation system back to life, walked somewhere north of 20,000 steps in a day carrying my tools, and got the water moving while the moving was good. Then, in a reminder that luck events run both ways, the water was shut off again, not enough in the river to feed the ditches, and we returned to waiting.
That's farming. That's also, if I'm honest, a fairly precise metaphor for leadership: you read the conditions, you move when the moment opens, and you hold your plans lightly when nature has other ideas.
Mindset is everything right now, we are pausing, planning, and thinking creatively about what it means to steward this land well through a potentially dry summer. This will not be the year for expansion. It will be the year for depth.
The barn, meanwhile, is closing in on completion. The last trade on the schedule is the fire protection system, and when that's done, Sweet Earth Orchard becomes what it was always being built to be: a place for the kind of grounded, unhurried work that changes people. Planning for our summer of reconnection is about to get a lot more fun.
We look forward to seeing you soon,
Steve