Success, Randomness and The Wiggles
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be successful and researching how others found success.
A lot of successful people will admit their wins involved a bit/lot of luck. Or as Guy Kawasaki puts it good karma. Others believe they are the masters of their universe and they cannot fail (this seems to fade with youth though…)
I recently read a great book called “Fooled By Randomess” by Nassim Taleb, that talks about the role randomness plays in life and specifically financial markets. Nassim’s success as a trader came from his acceptance that failure will always occur and that you must place yourself in the position to expect and capitalize on those random failures.
I think this idea is applicable here since most successful entrepreneurs fail many many times before they succeed. In fact they often succeed because they bootstrap themselves from failures (I hope to be one of these). The best example of this is James Dyson’s story where he failed hundreds of times before succeeding at creating his famous vacuum.
That’s not to say that you can’t be successful when you are young, look at Mark Zuckerburg or even The Million Dollar homepage guy, but these two aren’t exactly the norm. I imagine if you suggested to them luck was why their ideas took off over everyone elses they would be terribly insulted. We all want to believe deep down that we know exactly how to build the next big thing, I sure thought that. Athletes are told to envision the goal, the free throw, the tackle. This is valuable but by no means will help when it’s raining on the day of the game.
My 1 year old loves this show called The Wiggles. It was started by a couple of ex-rockers from Australia. They each wear a different color shirt and sing silly songs about their dog, sleeping and buying apples. They have earned ten multi-platinum awards for sales of over 17 million DVDs and four million CDs! What a great story… Their pub rock band disbanded after little success then changing careers to become educators they hit upon a children’s rock band that’s now a worldwide phenomenon.
As I see it the key to success is perseverance. Failing… getting back on the horse and trying again. Only those that stop playing the game truly fail.
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