Capitalize your luck

You can’t control luck, but you can capitalize on it.

If someone wins millions in the lottery, it’s pretty fair to say they got lucky. But what if someone has unlikely success in transforming a small enterprise into a multi-million dollar company? Did they get lucky, too? Of course, creating success in business demands strategy, skill, and plenty of hard work. But when it comes to whether an entrepreneurial idea gets off the ground, a product finds its market, or an enterprise successfully scales, luck often plays a big part.

Luck, in the strictest sense of the word, is purely random. It can have seismic consequences for you and your business, and yet you can neither cause nor control it. But you can leverage whatever luck does come your way, whether it's good or bad, to produce great results.

In their book Great by Choice, Jim Collins and Morton Hansen studied how luck affected the trajectories of wildly successful entrepreneurs. They found all these entrepreneurs had enjoyed good luck and weathered bad. When they contrasted these iconic entrepreneurs with a control group, though, they found that the latter had experienced roughly the same number of lucky events.

What set the icons apart from the rest, then?

To begin with, when unexpected opportunities came their way, they were ready to capitalize on them. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1997. Instead of retiring to enjoy his wealth, he founded another computer company, NeXT. But NeXT never really cracked the market. Instead of giving up, Jobs kept at it. Then his luck changed. A floundering Apple needed a new operating system, and NeXT had one that fit the bill. Apple acquired NeXT, and Jobs negotiated to be rehired in the acquisition. Yes, it was a stroke of luck that Jobs’s operating system was just what Apple needed. But without hard work and persistence, he’d never have been in a position to fill Apple’s need.

Perhaps even more revealing is how successful entrepreneurs respond to bad luck and failure. Collins and Hansen found that early bad luck was often more critical to a company’s ultimate success than early good luck. In fact, they found visionary entrepreneurs were more likely to suffer early setbacks. These setbacks prompted them not just to recover from bad luck but to implement strategies and structures that bulletproofed them against future failure.