I’m not sure if you believe in miracles, luck, or serendipity, but all three of them struck one Sunday in a tiny Nebraska church in 1950.
It's a cold March in Nebraska. We're at the West Side Baptist Church. Choir practice starts at 7:15. The Reverend comes in a few hours early to put the furnace on so it's not cold when everyone arrives. He sets everything up and goes home for dinner.
Choir practice starts at 7:15. At 7:25, a gas leak causes an explosion. The blast demolishes the church, destroys the windows of nearby buildings, and takes a nearby radio station off the air.
Every single one of the 15 choir members survived. It turns out they were all running late. And each choir member had a different excuse. One was napping. Some were still eating dinner. One was waiting in the car to pick up another. One couple had to change their kids’ diapers.
Sometimes luck strikes like lightning. But most of the time, luck is like oil.
I can't promise that you'll ever have a single stroke of luck as massive as the choir members of the West Side Baptist Church. But in aggregate, you certainly could. Most of the time, luck lies dormant, waiting to be encountered. If you spent your whole life poking about in the ground nonchalantly, you might find very little, or enough to last a lifetime.
Luck is like oil - it's there, under the surface, waiting for the persistent to tap into it.
The better you get at identifying where luck might be, and the more you're willing to dig for it, the more you'll find. Luck is only a ‘coin toss’ until you get intentional about finding it. The more you look for oil, and the more finely you tune your technology to see it below the surface, the more you will dig, and the more you will find.
The worst entrepreneurs get luck - the best ones build it. You can't consistently capitalise on chance occurrences by accident. The luckiest people you know hunt down serendipity like it's buried gold. At scale, and over time, getting lucky is a skill.
Make the decision to get lucky today.
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