Luck, something successful people often fail to mention enough. Ideas and projects are rarely unique, in reality everything is redundant especially when it comes to entrepreneurship or even technology. Excluding some genius level discoveries, realization or talent, everything that have happened could have taken another way and led to similar results.
The biggest factor in success, in my opinion, is luck. Many geniuses fail, many rich people fail, many hard working people fail, few lucky people fail.
I do not know what to call it really, but it is, as if the universe have favorites. I have seen it first hand many times, and i think this is also something that each of us witnessed in life.
I will take for example, a quote from my favorite entrepreneur Elon Musk:
Working 16 hours a day, 7 day’s a week, 52 week’s in the year and people still calling me lucky
My response to Elon’s argument is: How many others working as hard, and are barely making ends meet ? How many entrepreneur working as hard and failing. As an entrepreneur myself, what Elon described is the standard workload for most startup entrepreneurs.
Eric Schmidt Goggle’s former CEO, was honest about it, he said:
I think almost anyone who’s successful has to start by saying they were lucky
Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt, continued “Lucky of birth, lucky of having intellectual and intelligent family home life, upbringing, global upbringing, etc.”
In the above case of Elon Musk, he was lucky he had a father who thought him engineering at a very young age, and passed to him “genius genes”. He was also lucky his mom taught him to work hard.
An advantage I did have is that my father is a talented electrical & mechanical engineer, so I was taught a lot engineering (without appreciating it at the time)
Elon Musk tweet
The case of being lucky, doesn’t stop at education :
My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest. [Both] my children and I won what I call ‘the ovarian lottery,’” says Warren Buffett
A big factor in success, is having wealthy parents or influential parents.
Mark zuckerberg was able to get $100 000 loan from his dad. Jeff Bezos got a $300 000 loan from his parents. Bill Gate’s mother, Mary Gates, who was president of United Way at the time, convinced IBM to hire Microsoft, to create an operating system.
I will dedicate an entire article on the role of money in success.
Without a doubt, i can say that i do agree with what Eric said, Anyone who’s successful have encountered success one way or another at the beginning of the journey.
Now, what is luck? and can we actually provoke luck by persevering that’s another question for another article.
