I feel blessed to be where I am now but also I know I worked incredibly hard for it so there's a bit of "I deserve this life I built for myself". When younger entrepreneurs ask me 'advice' my word usually is "just work until you make it" is it incomplete without luck being a factor?
My own life has really been a series of lucky events I tried my chances in. I've also heard people say you can't control luck but can't you? Get to know, work with and just network with the right people. Put yourself in places where the opportunities you want exist (example, if you wanna be a star go to LA) and it'll sure take some time but there's no way nothing ever comes to you. And when something even 0.1% of what you actually want comes your way accept it and make the best of it, it might just help you get closer to what you want.
Did you get lucky or did you work hard?
byu/queskow inEntrepreneur
Posted by queskow
6 Comments
Success is when preparation meets opportunity.
You are lying to yourself if you think luck isn’t a major factor. Also hard work.
I definitely think luck or at least timing is extremely important. If Bezos had been born 5 years later, he would have missed the nascent Web, and we might not have Amazon (but definitely some monolithic alternative, a vacuum will always be filled). I think about my own journey, and how easy it was to make money on the Web in the late 90s and early noughties with basic coding skills.
I was raking it in due to Google launching AdWords and being able to buy up keywords people were searching for, for pennies with little competition. That was luck. Getting a Commodore 64 for Christmas 1991 was luck: teaching myself to code on it was not. Being allowed a dialup internet connection in 1996 when I was 16 was luck, my family could afford it.
Think about all the people who bought domain names in the 90s for $9.99 when the internet was “just a fad” (according to Bill Gates), that are now worth millions. Luck.
Luck plays a massive role: bad luck derailed my life so I am biased perhaps, but I know that I have worked much harder the last decade than I did in the early noughties when success came so easy, but nothing has replicated those early successes.
Both.
*’I worked hard and I was fortunate to have certain advantages’.*
This is not a contradiction.
In fact, I’d say it’s an extremely healthy mindset.
**Self esteem + gratitude = winning.**
It’s both. The you can work really hard and fail but most times you won’t succeed if you don’t work hard
Do you want to go deeper and talk about the “parents lottery”? My parents risked death to escape a communist dictatorship so we could have a life in North America. My dad worked hard so we could have stable housing. Without these things my entrepreneurial spirit barely matters (in a sense). I guess my drive would have led me to be a successful hustler on the street vs a successful business person in my wealthy neighborhood.
A LOAD LOTS of Luck but then a TON OF HARDWORK as well.
I personally came from a background where none of my first cousins or other close relatives even finished their high school, and I was the first one to cross that line. Running my own business seemed like a distant dream back in the days, and I could never have even imagined the lifestyle that I am blessed with now.
It’s easy to say I got lucky and I wouldn’t deny it, but there’s a lot of hard-work behind all this, even today.