Everyone who’s been successful knows that more often than
not the success comes down to a combination of hard work and luck. Ideas and
skill are important too. But ultimately it’s the people who increase their
chances of success through perseverance and hard work who are successful. Of
course there are some people who owe their success more to luck than anything
else (and we’ll look at ten of those people later in this article). The fact is
we’re always going to have to let some of the puzzle pieces fall into place. We
can’t micromanage the world. We can’t perfectly execute every detail down to
the sub-atomic level of reality. What we can do as business people, is to
create the best possible set of circumstances to achieve our goals, and then to
let luck work itself out from there.
When I started out my online business I didn’t know what I
was doing. I had some technical skills and I had a dream: to work for myself. I
took a lot of stabs in the dark. The learning curve was steep. And I failed a
whole lot. But I persevered and learned what works and what doesn’t work. The
perseverance allowed me to learn how to improve my chances of “getting lucky.”
And eventually I got “lucky” with a few small successes. And then duplicated
the “luck” a few times and got even more lucky. It turns out that in business,
“luck” can be controlled.
Because of the huge respect I have for the “luck” aspect of
success, I decided it would be fun for BusinessPundit to put together a list of
accidental discoveries that made people rich. And here’s that article:
Sometimes the most lucrative business discoveries come about
by sheer chance. Here we bring together ten resourceful men whose incidental
discoveries are a template for budding entrepreneurs looking to make a quick
buck. While these finds may have come about by accident, it is no coincidence
that they went on to generate huge profits. Each discovery exemplifies how with
ingenuity, prudent investment in R&D and a bit of good fortune, companies
and individuals can make billions. Most of these discoveries found many
applications, which, with some skillful marketing, were able to take the world
by storm. They offer valuable lessons in business that can help anyone to start
a company.