Up All Night To Get Lucky

Have you ever wondered why certain people are always lucky? And I’m not talking about the ones that win raffles all the time, but rather the ones that find success over and over in their careers. Truth be told, I believe there’s always a certain amount of luck involved with becoming successful; however don’t let that distract you from the amount of hard work and the right mindset that I believe is also required to position yourself to be ba beneficiary of that luck.

I’ve had a few bouts in my short business career that I believed at one time were due to luck. Take for example my former automotive web site – I started it in 1997 and sold it in 2010. When I was approached with an offer to sell it, I was somewhat shocked and remember telling myself, “Wow, how lucky was I?”. The offer not only came out of nowhere, but it was much higher than I would have ever expected. Looking back on that though, there was a tremendous amount of work, networking and working with others that had to go into building the site into a huge member base and over one million hits per day. Without all of that, the web site wouldn’t have been valuable and the opportunity for someone to want to purchase it would have never presented itself.

Again, what I truly believe is that you have to set yourself up to be in the right place at the right time. It takes hard work, vision, generosity and networking to get there. To dig into this further, I’m going to once again call upon my favorite person on Twitter, Vala Afshar – the Chief Marketing Officer for Extreme Networks, author of The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence, host of CxOTalk and blogger for the Huffington Post and Inc Magazine. I wrote a blog post about Why Your Best Employees Leave, which was also based on one of his tweets. He tweeted something that I identified very closely with, so again, I was inspired to write about it. Here is the tweet:

Most of these are pretty self-explanatory. What the amazing part about this concept is that it doesn’t take much to set yourself up to be in the right place at the right time. None of the items Mr. Afshar listed are out of the realm of what being a great businessperson or entrepreneur already means – but the two that really stood out were “teach others” and “stay teachable”.

It was an aha moment for me – this is how you fine tune your knowledge and skill set, by teaching others. The more you engage your team, the more dialogue takes place, and the more you’re able to refine everything you already know. Think of it as practice, in the same way that professional athletes practice for games. How many times have you heard about veteran athletes being brought into a team for the sole purpose of training the young guys? Or to be a veteran role model? This is no different.

Staying teachable is where it might become a bit difficult for some business veterans. At a certain point of success, most people like to think they know everything – sometimes even before then – and that can be a huge mistake. Staying teachable allows you to continue to grow, to become more efficient, and maybe even learning new ways of doing the things you already know. A good businessperson or entrepreneur should want to always stay teachable because you can never learn too much, there’s always something new on the horizon. And if you think about it, learning new tricks of the trade can even give you a competitive advantage over your competition.

Don’t ever get too comfortable, there’s always room to grow. And if you want to get lucky, do the work first!