Luck Is Just Hard Work Wearing Sunglasses

Anytime I come across a success story or see someone at the top of their career or industry, I spend quite a bit of time studying them. This has led me to study successful people across different fields, trying to understand what separates those who become exceptionally good at what they do from everyone else working towards the same goal.

I have looked at people in business, sports, writing and product management. The more stories I read, the more I keep coming back to one observation: becoming one of the best requires an insane amount of work. It takes extreme effort that compounds over time, no matter the field. Nobody reaches the top of their game through luck alone.

We are often quick to explain somebody's success by talking about luck, talent, connections or being in the right place at the right time. But we rarely give the same attention to the years of work that came before the breakthrough.

Someone launches a successful business, wins a major competition, publishes a bestselling book or creates a product that changes an industry, and suddenly everybody wants to know their secret. We want to know the turning point, the big decision or the one meeting that changed everything. We want a neat little story that explains how somebody went from being an ordinary person to becoming exceptional at something.

And I get it. The breakthrough is exciting. Nobody wants to read a 400-page account of somebody spending ten years getting a little better at something.

But I think we sometimes confuse the moment the world noticed somebody with the moment that person started becoming great.

James Dyson learnt this in a very different way. In 1978, he began working on the idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner, eventually spending five years building 5,127 prototypes. Established manufacturers rejected his invention, partly because it threatened the existing market for replacement vacuum bags. Instead of abandoning the idea, he eventually took the risk of building the business himself. His first mass-produced vacuum cleaner launched in 1993 and became a major commercial success.

Think about that for a moment. Five thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven prototypes. I can barely tolerate redoing a presentation because somebody changed their mind about the font. 😭

Another great example is Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history. By his own account and that of his coach, Bob Bowman, he trained for about five to six hours a day, six days a week, for years, covering roughly fifty miles in the pool each week. For a long stretch, he reportedly took no days off at all, not even on holidays. His rivals took Sundays, birthdays and Christmas off. Phelps took to the pool. When people watched him win eight gold medals in Beijing in 2008, they saw a few minutes of talent. They did not see the thousands of mornings that had looked almost exactly the same.

Now imagine putting that much work into something and still not getting the result you wanted. That is the part of success we do not talk about enough. Training does not guarantee a gold medal, just as studying does not guarantee a job and doing good work does not guarantee a promotion. But without preparation, you are asking luck to do the work you have not done yourself.

There is no way I can write about this topic without talking about Brian Acton, who spent around eleven years working at Yahoo before leaving to look for his next opportunity. In 2009, he applied to Twitter and was rejected. A few months later, Facebook rejected him too. Imagine spending years building your career, sending out applications and hoping for a new beginning, only to be told twice that you are not the person they are looking for.

Most of us know how that feels, even on a smaller scale. You refresh your inbox, see another rejection and start wondering whether you are good enough, whether your experience counts for anything or whether everyone else has figured out something you have not.

Acton did not know then that Facebook would eventually acquire WhatsApp, the company he would go on to co-found with Jan Koum, for approximately $19 billion in 2014. The company that had rejected him became the buyer of the business he helped build.

It is a remarkable twist, but the important part is what happened between those two moments. He kept moving, continued working and helped build something valuable in its own right. His story does not prove that every rejection will lead to a better offer. It reminds us that one company's decision does not get to determine the rest of our story.

And sometimes the journey is much less dramatic from the outside. Sometimes there is no invention, no Olympic stadium and no big announcement. Sometimes it is simply a person showing up to work every day, learning the business and slowly earning the responsibility they want.

Mary Barra started at General Motors in 1980 as an 18-year-old co-op student, checking fender panels and inspecting hoods while using her earnings to help pay for university. Over the following decades, she worked in engineering, manufacturing and business leadership, eventually taking responsibility for major parts of the company. In January 2014, she became CEO of General Motors, the first woman to lead one of the major American carmakers. Thirty-four years had passed between her early work on the factory floor and her appointment to the top job.

Thirty-four years.

When people talk about career success, we tend to focus on the promotion, the salary increase or the new title. We rarely think about the years spent learning how the business works, taking on new responsibilities, making mistakes and developing the judgement needed to lead at a higher level. Barra did not suddenly become qualified to run a global carmaker on the day she got the job. The work that prepared her had been happening for decades.

I think this is particularly important when you are trying to build your own career. It is easy to look at someone who has reached a senior position and wonder why you are not there yet, especially when the job market is difficult and every application seems to disappear into a black hole. But you may be comparing your current chapter with somebody else's thirty-fourth year in the business.

That does not mean you should sit still and wait decades for your turn. It means you should build the skills, experience and judgement that will prepare you for the next opportunity, while continuing to look for places where you can grow. Of course, hard work does not protect you from rejection.

Nobody shows up from nowhere. You just missed the grind.

Luck does exist. Someone gets the right introduction, meets the right investor, finds the right opening or gets an opportunity at exactly the right time. But luck does not erase the years of work that came before it. Hard work does not guarantee that you will win, but you give yourself very little chance of success if you are unwilling to prepare, improve and keep going when things get difficult.

I also want to be honest about something. These are stories of people who worked hard and eventually achieved extraordinary success. There are people who work just as hard and never get the same outcome. That matters, because I do not want to pretend that everyone who fails simply did not want it enough. Circumstances, resources, health, responsibilities and opportunity all play a part.

But that does not make the work any less valuable, and it does not mean you should give up on something that matters to you just because the results have not arrived yet.

If you have been laid off, passed over for a promotion, rejected by recruiters or stuck in a job that feels like a waiting room, I understand how exhausting it can be to keep trying when nothing seems to change. It is difficult to put in the work when you cannot see where it is leading. It is even harder when you look around and feel as though everybody else is moving forward while you are standing still.

But do not let the fact that you are struggling today convince you that you are incapable of doing something meaningful tomorrow. You are allowed to be disappointed. You are allowed to rest, take a break and catch your breath. You are allowed to change your approach when something is not working. What you cannot do is expect every worthwhile thing in your life to become easy simply because you have decided you want it.

At some point, you have to get comfortable with the work itself: the practice, the repetition, the rejection, the uncomfortable feedback and the hours spent learning something you are not good at yet. You have to be willing to do the work when nobody is clapping, when there is no immediate reward and when you are still a long way from the result you want.

So get with the programme. Stop waiting for the perfect time, the perfect opportunity or the magical moment when everything suddenly becomes easy. Make the application. Learn the skill. Finish the project. Ask for feedback. Build the thing. Put yourself forward for the opportunity you keep talking yourself out of. If your approach is not working, learn from it and change it. If you need a break, take one, but come back ready to do the work properly.

You might not get the result the first time. You might not get it the fifth time. But you owe yourself the chance to find out what you can achieve when you stop treating every setback as a reason to quit.

Nobody owes you the breakthrough. You have to give yourself a chance to earn it.

Come back, pay your dues and earn your fees. 💜

With love,

Your DMD