
There are self-proclaimed experts who would tell you to “do what you love” and “follow your passion.” They’d say that the financial rewards would come naturally.
I had been hearing these lines for years and I can tell you they’re hogwash.
What I did learn was that hard work and luck were essential to success. Not either one but both were needed.
Some may disagree, but that’s what I learned. Work hard and hope I get lucky along the way.
You don’t make money by waking up every morning at 4:00am to get a so-called daily headstart by checking your email or do morning calisthenics. You don’t get wealthy because you adopted a well-articulated vision & mission statement. And you don’t get rich because your parents or a rich friend loaned you money.
You succeed because you had what you thought are good ideas and you ran with them. You invented products and made available innovative services which made your ideas into realities. You figured out how to sell them. You didn’t stop when you had more demand that you could handle. You delivered, kept costs under control, and priced your products & services competitively. You were relentless.
You enrolled people whom you not only hired as employees but also labelled them as partners. You welcomed their input, worked with them in teams, but still solely made the decisions. You were a teammate, but you reminded them who’s boss.
And you did the same with customers, vendors, and investors. You were the leader of your enterprise, not them. You appreciated their support and their advice, but you steered your enterprise. There were times you spent sleepless nights thinking about scary things some people warned you about, but you always knew you were the true owner of your ideas behind the enterprise, and you determined its destiny.
The more successful you became, the more ‘friends’ appeared. And with ‘friends,’ came their clamour for your attention. Some would seek your company with the aim of getting a piece of your action. Some would ask for your time, your donation to a questionable ‘worthy’ cause, and some would outright ask for a sizeable cash hand-out. You would become wary, therefore, of the intentions of the people you meet and know.
You would judge who deserved your attention and who didn’t. You may have felt guilty at first for ignoring the latter, but you’d grow out of it and learn not to think twice. You knew when to care and not to care about what people said.
You get that one-way sacrifices which don’t contribute value-added results are not as worth it as win-win mutually beneficial relationships. You stand to benefit as much as your counterparts did. Seeking mutual benefit is not a sin. It’s a virtue.
You depended on luck and that meant watching out for opportunities. When opportunities did knock, you made sure to answer. The trick was to find out which were potentially rewarding and which weren’t.
I had deemed myself as a not-so-successful person. I squandered opportunities despite working hard with what I had. Relative to many successful people, I felt I didn’t make the cut.
But I also learned that it’s futile to compare myself to other people. I still have my ideas and it’s still up to me to work hard to make them successful realities given my simultaneously seeking luck from potential opportunities
In short, you’d find success from working hard and looking for luck. Not from taking advice from or rubbing shoulders with so-called experts you don’t really know or who don’t really care about you or your ideas.
If you do want me to suggest a slogan. Here is my favourite:
You can do it.








