Does Luck really favor the brave?
Comparing our lives with others is probably the biggest hobby and pastime of humans… Sometimes we watch in awe the growth and success of certain individuals particularly those who don’t fall into our traditional criteria to be met by people to be successful.
This article is a continuation of my earlier podcast of a very similar topic link to which is attached below.
Like mentioned in the podcast somethings happen because of certain things which preceded them very often without we even knowing about it.
To borrow the phrase from Steve Jobs as and when we look back into our lives also, we can see the sequence of events which eventually led to what we are today Steve Jobs coined this as “Connect the Dots”.
But does Luck just favor the brave? Let’s look at some real-life examples of situations which will bring in better clarity to this thought.
We all know about Bill Gates and the story about how as a young whiz kid started writing code for IBM and the creation and success of Microsoft. Gates went to Lakeside school just outside Seattle in the US. What is interesting it was one of the few high schools at that time which even had a computer. How the Lakeside school got a computer is another interesting story.
Bill Dougall was a World War II navy pilot who had turned into a math’s and science teacher and taught at Lakeside School. In 1968 Dougall petitioned the Lakeside school mothers school to use about 3000 dollars from its annual rummage sale to lease a computer which could then be hooked up to a General Electric mainframe terminal for computer time sharing. What’s interesting the concept of time sharing itself was only invented in 1965 and Bill Dougall had the foresight to utilize this at Lakeside school.
It is at the computer that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two people who went on to create Microsoft worked on learned and fine-tuned their programming skills
Let’s now compare this with some interesting statistics. In 1968 as per the records of UN there were some 303 million high school age students in the world. Out of this about 18 million students lived in the US and out of which 300 people attended Lakeside school. So, the odds of someone studying the Lakeside school were 0.00010%.
This doesn’t mean that Bill Gates wasn’t brilliant nor that he didn’t work hard nor that he didn’t have a vision. He had all these, but it was only because Bill Dougall had the foresight to get a computer for Lakeside school did all things fall in place the way they did.
While we all know about Bill Gates and Paul Allen who went onto to form Microsoft how many of us know about Kent Evans the third member of this gang of high school computer prodigies at Lakeside school.
Among the three it was Bill and Kent who were the most ambitious, always thinking together of what they would do 5 to 6 years down the line. The reason we don’t know about Kent Evans is because he died in a mountaineering accident before we could complete high school. In the seventies when this accident occurred there used to be around 36 mountaineering deaths in the US. The odds of someone studying in high school dying in a mountaineering accident was again about 0.00010%.
But does this mean Bill Gates was just lucky to get all the success that he went on to achieve? Let me share some other examples which could throw light on the same.
During this week I had read about Google winding up its gaming platform. So, despite being a dominant market leader in many of the latest fields this is one area where Google felt it wasn’t gaining traction. In 2004 when Gmail was launched with one gigabyte of storage Bill Gates criticized the decision saying why would anyone need so much of memory for ever in their lifetime. It’s well known that despite being such a dominant market leader in the same field Microsoft lost out on an opportunity in emails and mobiles because of the same.
But what’s crucial is that such failures along the way haven’t stopped successful individuals or organizations from continuing in their quest. And it is this continuous quest that brings luck also onto their side over a period.
That doesn’t mean that you need not become good or brilliant in whatever you do, but more than the brilliance it is the capability to continue with it over a long period of time which gets luck as we call it on their side.
Luck is what happens when persistence meets opportunity. Nothing falls into your lap without some hard work on your side, even to win a lottery, you need to buy a lottery ticket or buy one consistently over a period of time.
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