Does luck play a factor in success?

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Sun, 06/05/2005 - 2:40pm.

The Window Manager is a great blog about working in a corporation. Your host is the anonymously named Mitch. The blog has detailed his life in corporate America with sidelines into his personal dealings. It's a very good read if you're exposed to the ways and means of corporate life.

The term window manager is from the Japanese culture. when a high level corporate manager has little to do except look out a window.

The Window Manager blog is an interesting read for three reasons:

He's anonymous, so there is a little guess work about him.
He has had many posts in the technical field.
He relates stories that you have experienced.

In his latest post, Mitch laments the fact that he feels depressed after meeting a former high school friend:

We were at the exact same place 19 years ago, and today we are on different levels - mine far below his. But it wasn't skill or intelligence or ability that made the difference. It was luck.

Is it really luck that helps define your success in business? I know for me luck has played a very important part.

But is luck truly luck? Could luck be a better term for being prepared?

There is no doubt that dumb luck sometimes plays a part in business. The companies that find themselves with a product they happened upon, the chemist that accidentally creates a new formula or a business meeting made when the competitor misses it.

But there is also smart luck that comes from being prepared. I can point to many points in my career where smart luck has made the difference, but Microsoft Exchange is the best.

In the early 1990s while attending Comdex in Las Vegas, I was lucky to score tickets to a meeting involving Microsoft and developers discussing their new email platform, Exchange. Exchange was to become the replacement to Microsoft Mail. In the meeting I was able to learn about the product, make contacts at Microsoft and gain a copy of the beat software. The fact I attended the meeting was lucky as I was prepared to head back to the hotel, but it started raining. Getting a taxi or shuttle bus back to the hotel was next to impossible, so I decided to walk around and stumbled into the meeting. Not only did learning about Exchange before everyone else place me as an expert in the area, it allowed me to beat the market in terms of articles and books.

The smart luck comes from the fact that I knew Comdex was the place to learn about emerging technologies and I was smart enough to realize that group communication would become a major force in corporations.

So does luck play a part in success? Sure does. But there are two kinds of luck. One where things happen to you out of the blue and the other where you're laying the ground work for things to happen to you out of the blue.