Over the last three months, I met two gentlemen, one of whom believed he’s incredibly lucky and the other is dejected with his life and believes he has no (good) luck what-so-ever.
Typically, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t believe in luck, good or bad. I’m talking about what people believe is random luck where you tend to buy a lottery ticket and win a million dollar. Instead, I believe for things to happen you’ve to work towards it. Sometimes hard sometimes not so much. But you have to make that effort.
But discussions with these guys made me question my own way of thinking towards the subject.
I mean in no way the second dude didn’t have it in him. He’s one of the smartest guy I know.
But then what is luck?
Take for example. In 2003, China was suffering from deadly SARS epidemic. Almost everyone was guaranteed in their house. This epidemic worked differently for two companies.
Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, benefitted from the epidemic as many people were scared to death to move out of their house and buy things. They instead started ordering online. Before this, Chinese people didn’t trust e-commerce companies. Now I’m not saying that the epidemic alone was responsible for the uptick in e-commerce transaction for Alibaba. But it helped the company greatly. [1]
The second company is Motorola. Motorola’s then CEO, Chris Galvin, had a plan to turn around the company. The plan was to launch a new generation of mobile devices. But due to SARS epidemic the production of these devices was delayed.
The board of directors under pressure from the Wall Street and media fired Chris. Obviously, the board acted hastily and that’s another story. But things didn’t work out that well for Motorola at that time.
Now things like these are pure luck. Good or bad.
In no way, either Motorola or Alibaba, would have anticipated these circumstances.
Can you change your luck?
I have been mulling over this for more than two months now. Most of the time when people talk about luck, they completely ignore all the efforts one has put to get the outcome. What they see is the outcome.
For example, if someone wins the $1 million in lottery as mentioned above, the person made some efforts. They went out and bought the ticket. The chances of winning a lottery are stacked against us, yet the person went out and bought the ticket.
Couple of months ago I found out about Nodejs class by Samal Gorai. I signed up for his email newsletters. I did this because I had tried learning Nodejs on my own and had failed just months before this. He then offered a Bootcamp worth Rs 14,999 and I got to attend it for free as a bonus. [2]
Now I was at the right place at the right time and benefitted from it. Some may call this luck, but they will ignore the fact that I had taken the effort to learn a new skill, nevermind that I failed when I tried to learned it on my own. If I hadn’t taken the efforts, I wouldn’t have been able to spot this wonderful opportunity. When we joined the email list, more than 30 people had joined, but only five of us continued with the Bootcamp, which is where the real learning happened.
If I had given up learning Nodejs after my first failed attempt, I wouldn’t have been “lucky” enough to spot Samal’s Bootcamp.
So coming back to the question, what is luck?
Luck is 5% spotting things and 95% efforts.
What Chris Galvin could have done in the circumstances to avoid getting fired? He could have acted quick and found manufacturing somewhere else.
What could have the second person I met who’s dejected with his life could have done better? He could have tried harder. Sometimes being smart is not enough.
[1] I read this in the book Alibaba’s World by Porter Erisman. It’s a wonderful book on how Alibaba started and its journey so far. It’s a must read if you want to understand how Chinese markets work.
[2] Samal Gorai now takes up classes to teach Nodejs to college students or training startup employees. I will not discuss why it’s important to train employees or pick up new skills. I am confident enough with my newly acquired skills that I have picked up a project on Nodejs.
He also runs Playschool.me and is taking up external projects on Angularjs for now.
Some of our pictures from the Bootcamp:
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