Ask incredibly successful entrepreneurs – ask people who are incredibly successful in any pursuit – and every one of them will say luck played an important role in their success. Talent, expertise, determination, perseverance, all those qualities and many more are certainly important. But so is luck: meeting the right person, being at the right place, making a snap decision that turns out so much better than you ever expected…
“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. –Thomas Jefferson”
It’s easy to assume successful people are just luckier than the rest of us. Take Bill Gates: Lucky enough to go to one of the few schools with a Teletype connection so he could learn to program. Take Paul Allen: Lucky enough to stumble across an article which led to the idea to convert Basic into a product that could be used on an Altair computer… and lucky enough to be friends with Bill Gates… who was lucky enough to then be at Harvard and with access to a PDP-10 computer to use to develop and test the new operating system.
But were Bill and Paul simply lucky? Of course not.
Luck isn’t just a random gift from the universe. (Winning the lottery is, but that’s a different kind of luck.) Luck actually has less to do with what happens to you and more to do with how you think and act.
