Why I don’t believe in luck: Part 2
Yesterday I posted that I no longer believe in luck in business. And some people agreed and some people did not, which is what I expected. However, I felt that I needed to give more context to my thought process.
Let me share an example to emphasize my point. My first big win with my first company, Spunlogic, was a huge web design project with a New Zealand company. This was a $65,000 project and our largest project previously was $550. No joke. Super lucky, right?
So we got our first office space, hired our first non-founder employee, quit our other jobs, and got to work.
One month into the project, still waiting on the first check, we received word from New Zealand that the company went bankrupt, the project was canceled, and we were never going to get a dime.
Was getting the project in the first place good or bad luck? Was losing it good or bad luck?
My viewpoint would be that each of these situations was what we made of it. At the time, winning the project seemed like the best luck we’d ever had. And then when we lost it, and that felt like the worst thing that could possibly have happened.
Only it wasn’t. In fact, I list losing that project as one of the luckiest things that ever happened to us. We were pot committed at that point. We had employees. We had office space. We quit our jobs. So we forced ourselves to be “all in” and at that point, we HAD to make the company work.
If we had decided to shut down the business after losing the account, then we would have always labeled that as “bad” luck. But we didn’t, and instead, it was “good” luck. Right?
This is my point. We all have things come our way in business that we could label either good or bad luck. It’s what we make of those things, how we tackle them, that ultimately defines whether they are positive or negative forces in our lives.
Again, I caveat this with the label “in business” and I recognize that, because of my male, white, Christian, straight privilege, I receive more opportunities than most people. That said, I still have to make the most of the opportunities that come my way.
That part, I believe, is up to me, and not some phantom, magical thing called “luck”.
[…] Without a doubt, it was those two qualities that Raj, Danny, and I had when we were starting Spunlogic. I was so naive that I just continued putting more and more debt onto my credit cards in order to fund the company. And it was determination that pushed us through when we were devastated by the loss of a major client in our early years (more on that story.) […]
[…] – Raj and I in New Zealand, where we landed the biggest deal we’d ever had…only to have it disappear a few months later. I think this was my first […]