Learning From Someone Else’s Luck
Success does not make you wise.
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We all fail much more than we succeed, so we all have plenty of experience with failure. Success is rare, so even if we find great success none of us have much experience with it. Most successful entrepreneurs only start one successful company, and even the best only start a handful. Compared with the vast mountains of failure, that is not a lot.
One of the problems with success is that it’s very hard to learn from. If you start a company and it becomes massively successful, you have a single data point. A single journey from zero to success. Was the success based on skill? Was it a specific decision you made? Was it luck?
How would you even know?
We would all like to believe our success is based on skill and grit, but in reality we have no control group to compare it with. We can’t go back in time and try other paths to see if we would have found success again. All we have is a single path.
Any path to success involves a large amount of luck, but it’s very rare to have a successful person admit it. It’s hard to be humble and admit your success wasn’t due to your talent or hard work, and so luck is recast as skill. A huge gamble that worked out, despite the long odds, is described as a genius decision.
So, if a successful person has experience with a single path to success which involves much more luck than they admit, what can you learn from them?
In my experience, you can’t learn much from their entire journey. However, you can learn a lot about specific decisions made along that journey! A specific decision, if you know all of the context and the options, can teach you a lot about how that decision impacted the journey and eventual success.
For example, at Flurry (my first company) we had an amazing 9-year journey to the heights of success. Flurry had been started as a mobile app developer, creating a suite of communication tools like email and news apps for mobile phones. In the pre-iPhone era Flurry was one of the largest developers of those kinds of apps, but making money in that market was very hard. We took a hard look at the business and realized that there was no viable path to success by continuing our strategy, even though we had reached millions of users.
We took inventory of our assets and realized that the analytics tools we had built for our own apps were likely useful to other app developers, and represented a better opportunity for the company. After considering many other options, we decided to pivot and become a mobile app analytics business. That pivot required complete commitment to the new direction, and so we let go of the mobile apps we had built. The pivot and our 100% commitment to it was pivotal to the future success of the business.
However, we also got very lucky! Right after we made that pivot, Apple launched the AppStore for iPhones and mobile applications exploded. We were at the right place at the right time with the right product, but we only controlled the product part of that equation. The timing of events outside of our control were much more impactful on our future success than any specific decision we made.
In this example, you can learn from our decision to pivot as it’s what made success possible. However, you can’t expand that to a bigger lesson due to how much luck was involved subsequently. The lesson is narrow and specific even if the success is large and expansive.
So, don’t try to recreate someone else’s path to success, as it’s impossible to recreate their luck. Instead, focus on the specific decisions they made along the way to success. Those might help you on your own journey to success!
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We all tend to overlook luck when we have it (and attribute the success to skill) and blame someone else’s success on that same luck