In November 2010, Nick Brown happened to find himself at a Manchester conference attending a talk by popular British psychologist Richard Wiseman, who had written a book called The Luck Factor.
“Basically, the way to be lucky is to just put yourself in situations where good things can happen,” Brown remembers, “because more good things will happen to you than bad on any given day, but nothing will happen to you if you just sit indoors.”
After the talk, Wiseman signed books. The pile dwindled down and down, and only four books remained when Brown made it near the front of the line. Four people were standing between him and Wiseman.
“I thought, ‘Well okay I’m not going to get one,’” he says. “And then I was about two feet from the front, and the woman in front of me, she was one step away from him—had been queuing for twenty minutes—she just decided she didn’t want a book anymore and walked off.”
“Well there you go,” Brown said, greeting Wiseman, “the science of luck.”
When teaching entrepreneurs I talk a lot about luck, and how luck in startups is not quite the same as the layman’s version of luck. That it has far more to do with being active in a market and having your eyes open to opportunities rather than just having something good happen out of the blue.
I found the story above in Nick Brown Smelled Bull, a blog post that came up in my daily news feed. Where there you go… a great example of startup luck.
