On luck, skill & hard work

Everyone debates if success is more a result of luck, hard work, or skill.

This is wrong.

Let me propose a different way to balance these 3.

The size of your outcome is far more impacted by the absence of luck than it is by the absence of hard work.

You can be lazy, get lucky AND have a huge outcome.

You can also work your ass off, be unlucky, and your outcome will always be much smaller than the person who gets lucky.

There is an argument that consistency of hard work and getting better will increase your luck surface area.

This is true, but only to a certain degree.

What you’re really aiming for is time in the oven.

The longer you can afford to wait for luck to ‘happen’, the better your probability of an outsized outcome.

In other words, you are just as likely to get lucky from staying in the game for 10 years whether your work 10x harder than the next guy who also stayed in the game for the same period of time.

Most of the incredibly large outcomes you hear about in business come down to market timing.

And that comes down to time in the market. It’s no different than investing.

I’ve watched incredibly talented entrepreneurs get decidedly unlucky in their timing. Were they ultimately successful, yup.

But were they as successful as the entrepreneur who built the ONE app that a mega-cap company needed and thus were acquired for $1B+ in under 2 years. Nope.

When you see someone achieve a very large financial outcome, there is a really good chance luck played an outsized role.

That doesn’t mean the person didn’t bust their ass.

Or they weren’t dedicated to their craft.

Luck just had more to do with it.

All this to say….

1 - The business category you are in matters when thinking about size of outcome. (Tailwinds vs. Headwinds)

2 - Naval is right. Work like a lion.

3 - If you want financial freedom, you’re odds of achieving it are better taking smaller swings than bigger ones.