As heard at the Artiman Ventures Concepts 2006 conference:
There are 3 things you need to do to be successful as an entrepreneur:
1. Get your product almost right. Don’t obsess over getting it perfect. You’ll potentially waste time or the window of opportunity may pass as you try to reach perfection before going live.
2. Hire well. As you achieve item 1., you must have a great team to help iterate towards perfection. If your team is mediocre, you’ll never get there.
3. Be lucky. Luck brings opportunity.
If you master item 3., it supercedes items 1 and 2.
As told by Basil Alwan, panel moderator and President of IP Products at Alcatel and Founder/CEO of TiMetra Networks.
I have always thought deeply on the role of luck in career, business, and in life. I have always thought that luck is a huge modifier in whether you’ll be successful in those 3 areas. It can supremely increase your chances, or likewise it can severely limit them too.
As you go through life, observe the people around you. It seems as though there are people who walk through life with luck following them wherever they go. No matter what they do or where they go, they seem to have good things happen to them no matter what. They lead charmed lives.
Then there is the other group. These are the people that seem to never have things go right. Bad things happen to them, or they never seem to get it right. They always seem to have things going wrong. It doesn’t mean they are bad people. Some of them are decent citizens and great friends. But fortune always seems to make them roll snake eyes.
Is this phenomenon fate or controllable? Some would say that luck is part of fate, and some higher power has granted you this power. Others would say that it is somewhat controllable, that you may manipulate events around both in large and in subtle ways to influence the overall outcome of things in your life.
I, for one, am in the camp that you can influence the odds. I believe that you can subtly and greatly influence events in your life to stack things in your favor. Think of the ways you can build your career, by carefully walking through companies, gaining promotions, and building your personal brand, so that you can actually craft success. Reducing impulsiveness and being more deliberate about how and where you invest can again stack the odds in your favor. These are just two examples – It is certainly better than just sitting around and waiting for things to happen, is it not?
As you go through life, can you pick out the lucky and unlucky people? Is it possible to surround you and your activities with lucky people to increase their chances for success?
Are you yourself lucky or unlucky?