Recently, I meet my friend at Jamba Juice. While we were enjoying our ‘healthy smoothies’, we started to talk about finances, work and business.
My friend is a hard worker. His business demands an averaging of 70 hours per week from him. He also hold a part time job that pays less but offers health insurance. His wife is also a workaholic. They are well off – not rich, but soon they will be the ‘millionaire next door’.
And for me, my wife and I work in health care. I also do this F.I.R.E. thing. We are not rich but were not living paycheck to paycheck either.
My friend emigrated from Ethiopia and I, from Kenya. We came to the United States as teenagers with nothing in our pockets. Our arrival was in the early 2000s. We did not know each other then. As a matter of fact, we did not meet each other until many years later.
Fast forward to that hot day in the summer of 2019 and there we were in our 30s reminiscing about our experiences in life. Since he is a contractor with one of the biggest electric car company in the world, he was quite busy and his business was thriving.
So I asked him, “for all the success you have had, what percentage do you attribute to luck vs. hard work?”
I was surprised when he said “90% hard work and 10% luck”. I always consider luck being a big factor in my life. I contribute 40% of my success to luck and 60% hard work. Sometimes, I go as high as 50% luck and 50% hard work.
His answer intrigued my curiosity and I thought about it some more. Here is a guy who came from one of the poorest country in the world (Ethiopia is doing better now than when he came) and he is living the American dream. How can he say luck play such a small role in his life?
I did a little research and I realized mild success requires hard work but huge success comes with great deal of luck. If you’re working 70 hours per week on your business, you see luck as almost insignificant. Solving problems everyday takes determination, discipline, and lets face it “hard work”. The ‘corner-store book store’ demand a lot of input and creativity form the owner. But for that book store to become a giant the size of Amazon, there is a significant level of luck that is required. So, to my friend and his small business, luck felt as if it wasn’t on his side.
On my case, I took the traditional road to my version of success. I went to college, then added another 2 years on top of my undergraduate to get me to my current career. Although I worked hard in school, I saw that as a necessary thing to do. But even after working hard in school and overcoming challenged of being poor and in a foreign country, I still saw my self as lucky. I have experienced a series of fortunate events that I had no control over and they changed my life.
For instance, my dad tried to come to the United States for 10 years. Every time he had some money, he would go to the US Embassy to apply for a visa and he would get denied. He had a high school education; and a result, the US government did not see the need to have him. He wasn’t a skilled person or a businessman (which means no H-1B visa). For 10 years he tried, he had sold almost everything that he owned. But one day, he was granted a visa and the rest is history.
To summarize my point, I see hard work as the road you have to take or the doors you have to knock. But luck is what opens those doors. My dad just needed one person in the embassy to say ‘yes’. That single stamp on the passport was our door – the door he had knocked for 10 years. On that day, LUCK opened the door and smiled at him.
Although luck opens the door, it is up to us to take advantage of the opportunities that luck provides. You have to realize when you’re getting lucky. Otherwise, you might loose an opportunity of a lifetime. Hard work is great, but hard work alone does not alway produce the desired outcome.
Tesla could have failed and my friend would not have his business. My dad could have given up after 9 years of hard work and disappointments, but luck was waiting for him on year 10. Luck has its own schedule. That is why persistence and hard work are important. There is no right or wrong when quantifying the role of luck. It is on a spectrum and your life experience will influence your answer.
In Kenya we used say “Luck doesn’t find you in bed, it will find you in the field”. So, get out there and put in some work. The more you hustle, the luckier you get.
Thank you for reading.
