Was it skill or was I lucky?

I left corporate life at 40 to create a company in Russia.
Five years later, I stopped working.

I had taken risks, pursued a vision, overcome hardships, made decisions and acted on them. I had placed myself in a position to succeed.

But I also sold the company two years before Russia invaded and annexed Crimea.

After the invasion and the sanctions that followed, the company was worth roughly half the price I had sold it for in US dollars.

I had not anticipated that development.

So how much of my success reflected good judgment and how much reflected good luck?

Successful entrepreneurs often believe that their success is mostly of their own making. They may acknowledge luck but minimise its contribution.

I have been pondering its impact for a long time.

Imagine two entrepreneurs in 2019.
One develops touchscreen kiosks for public spaces.
The other manufactures disposable medical gloves.

Then COVID arrives.

Demand for one product collapses.
Demand for the other explodes.

Neither entrepreneur created the pandemic.

Yet the same event became good luck for one and bad luck for the other because of the businesses they had already chosen to build.

The glove entrepreneur may believe he positioned himself to succeed.
The touchscreen entrepreneur may blame circumstances beyond his control.

The Perspective Shift

We create the position. Luck can radically change what that position is worth.

When entrepreneurs say they create their own luck, they often combine three different things:

• Creating more chances: positioning and acting in ways that increase the possibility of something favourable happening.
• Exploiting chance: recognising a new situation and having the ability to act, react or pivot when circumstances change.
• Pure luck: an external event that changes the value of what we are doing without being caused or anticipated by us.

We can influence the first two.
We cannot control the third.

The glove entrepreneur deserves credit for building the company and responding to the surge in demand. But he cannot take credit for the event that created that demand.

The touchscreen entrepreneur may have made a perfectly reasonable decision with the information available and still suffered from the same event.

Russia’s invasion of Crimea played no role in my creating a viable business, but it made the timing of my sale extremely fortunate.

Both things can be true.

So how should luck influence our next move?

We should not try to predict it. We cannot anticipate the next pandemic, war or external shock—or whether it will help or hurt us.

But the existence of luck should make us ask:
What makes this opportunity valuable today?
How dependent is that value on the current context?
Could I adapt if that context changed?

The objective is not to predict luck.

It is to understand how much our next move depends on the world remaining as it is.

Walk your talk,
Franck

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