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The Secrets to Building a Lucky Network
Then again, you may be lucky. Your business idea may intersect with its time and culture as if it were meant to be. Warren Buffett has famously credited most of his success to Luck. He claims he won the "ovarian lottery" by being born at the right time and in a country where his skill set allowed him to amass great wealth. Buffett asks people to imagine that there is a ball representing each person on the earth. If he had been one of those balls pulled out during a different era, say millions of years ago, he'd be pretty useless and likely eaten by some dinosaur. In a similar fashion, he acknowledges that his gift of allocating capital is driven by the circumstances of where he is. After all, if he were on a desert island without a capital market, the value of his skill goes nearly to zero.
So, Luck matters. In research for we did for our forthcoming book, Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, my co-authors and I were surprised at how many of the entrepreneurs and business builders we talked to attributed their success to Luck. The word came up frequently in interviews with company founders. Of those who took our Entrepreneurial Aptitude Test (a psychometric survey that you can take here), 25% turned out to be what we call Luck-dominant (only Heart-dominant was more common).
Our definition of Luck, however, isn't just about dumb luck. Many of the entrepreneurs and business builders we talked to also knew how to create Luck. I've written before about the Lucky Attitude that can lead to the type of circumstantial Luck that these entrepreneurs create and influence. The foundation is humility, believing that are many new things to discover. On top of that, there's the intellectual curiosity to devour novel experiences. Finally, optimism serves as a motivational driver to make you believe that you can and should do things differently — better, faster, and more beautifully. People with a Lucky Attitude consider all the reasons something might work before they assess the flaws.
But to convert a Lucky Attitude into success, you also need to build what we call a Lucky Network. I was just in Las Vegas spending time at the Downtown Project backed by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (who self-professes that Luck serves as a core factor in his success). The Downtown Project aims to create a community of entrepreneurship and ideas to transform the core of Las Vegas. Hsieh and his team highlight the importance of "serendipitous connections" in enabling this effort to succeed, and are working hard to facilitate such encounters. These serendipitous connections are what we mean by Lucky Networks.
The builder of a true Lucky Network is characterized by vulnerability, authenticity, generosity, and openness. Such folks tend to be able to just seemingly "bump" into the right people at the right time. A Lucky Network is not something that can premeditated. It is not a targeted list of must-have relationships, but rather it is a set of relationships built out of curiosity and friendship that somehow ends up encompassing people who turn out to be pivotal. The net present value and strategic fit of a given relationship or initial introduction in one's Lucky Network might be foggy at best, but unintended benefits often manifest for those who embrace relationships with openness. In our research, 86% of the Luck-dominant credit a key part of their success to towards an "openness to new things and people."
Chances are that the people we perceive as fortunate are consciously or subconsciously following the principles of a Lucky Attitude and a Lucky Network. The Lucky are humble. They are intellectually curious. They are optimistic. And they develop great relationships, less through obsequies and architected targeting, but by naturally, authentically, and generously giving and caring about people. The Luck-dominant entrepreneurs, in most cases, are the ones whom we most naturally like and admire. If only we could all be so lucky.
