The Influence We Have on Our Own Luck

⏱️ 5 min read

Pick any of my posts on entrepreneurship—or ask what I’ve been up to this year—and you’ll see I’m as enthusiastic about designing and building new ventures as I was eighteen years ago when I launched my first business.

Ever since regaining some breathing space from my last enterprise in 2023, I’ve been asking myself a simple but unsettling question:

Where do great enterprises really come from?

Are they the inevitable outcome of larger macro trends—the natural evolution of industries adapting to new technologies and neglected use cases? If so, there’s nothing new to add since The Innovator’s Dilemma was published in 1997.

Or are they the product of exceptional skill and genius—hard-won inches at the frontier of what’s possible—the adjacent possible, as Cal Newport calls it in So Good They Can’t Ignore You (perhaps my most quoted book this year)?

Or are they simply the result of flawless execution, regardless of how “good” the original idea was? As Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, put it:

“There’s no such thing as a good idea. Every idea is a bad idea. No idea performs the way you expect once you collide it with reality. So it’s all about taking these bad ideas and colliding them with reality as quickly as possible.”

The truth is, it’s likely a bit of all these things—coalescing in different proportions depending on the context.

But what I’ve found, through both reflection and experience, is that we often have more power to influence outcomes precisely where we least expect it.

In one of my analyses (I love Venn diagrams), I divided the factors behind successful entrepreneurial initiatives into three categories:

Sector-specific expertise
Entrepreneurial drive, stamina, and experience
Opportunity

1. Sector-specific expertise

This one is self-explanatory. Anyone with a deeper understanding of customer needs, operational hurdles, financing structures, or critical resources for one specific industry will be one—or a hundred—steps ahead of competitors in that industry.

Sector-specific expertise can be bought, but it’s expensive. It can be developed, but it takes time. And it can’t be faked. You can attract it with equity, but that requires exceptional vision to secure exceptional talent on those terms.

Whichever the case, it’s a broad moat—and a decisive advantage for any enterprise.

2. Entrepreneurial drive, stamina, and experience

These are transversal qualities. They have little to do with industry knowledge and often outshine it entirely.

Drive is what outsiders admire most about entrepreneurs—and what causes entrepreneurs the most turbulence. There’s nothing glamorous about being “driven.” From the inside, it means living in constant uncertainty, weathering rejection, and battling impostor syndrome—by definition, you’re trying to create value that hasn’t yet been proven to exist. It’s a gift, but also a curse. Every entrepreneur will relate to that.

Stamina has recently become a topic of its own, as the entrepreneurial world wakes up to the need for sustainability. The rollercoaster of entrepreneurship isn’t easy—or healthy. It means sleep deprivation, erratic diets, relentless stress, and social obligations that blur any boundary between work and life. The good news is, the culture around entrepreneurship is maturing: we now have routines, mentors, and role models who show that stamina can be cultivated, not just endured.

Experience, finally, is something entirely distinct from sector-specific expertise. It’s the hard-won experience of being an entrepreneur—the awareness that no one else is ultimately responsible, that you will have to make every call, carry every risk, and keep moving when there’s no one left to reassure you. It’s the muscle memory of leadership under uncertainty. And this is true even when you’re not a sole founder, because—as Daniel Ryan Moran, founder of Capitalism.com, puts it—startups are never 50/50 affairs; they’re 100/100.

All three—drive, stamina, and experience—can be trained. They take time, and the path isn’t linear, but they exist within what David Epstein in Range calls a kind learning environment: one where patterns repeat, feedback is (relatively) accurate, and experience compounds into genuine expertise (at least is true comparatively to many other fields).

3. Opportunity

Opportunity feels like something external—something that happens to us rather than something we create. But that’s only partly true.

In my reflections, I’ve come to think of opportunity as the intersection of four forms of proximity:

Supply: access to ecosystems rich in technologies or solutions with greater potential than the market currently exploits.
Market: access to customers eager to spend, adopt, evolve, and improve.
Talent: access to a community of people ahead of the curve—in skill, mindset, or expertise.
Capital: access to efficient, fluent, and risk-tolerant investment.

We don’t control the opportunities the environment presents. But we do control whether we place ourselves in environments rich in opportunity—places where at least one, ideally several, of those four factors thrive.

It also matters whether we live in ways that allow us to tap into them. You can’t expect luck to find you if you live in isolation, avoid networks, and shun curiosity.

It’s hard to be lucky in an economy where consumers are cautious, producers are shrinking, capital is scarce, and talent is leaving. And it’s almost impossible if your lifestyle cuts you off from connection.

But it’s hard not to be lucky in a place where consumers are eager to adopt the next thing, producers are scaling fast, capital works hand-in-hand with creators, and talent is flocking in. And it’s even harder to miss your shot if your daily routines—your work, your hobbies, your habits—all bring you into contact with people who stretch your world.

It’s certainly important to refine our skills, to operate near our strengths, and to seek mentorship in navigating the startup landscape.

But perhaps the single most decisive factor in our control—the one that quietly amplifies everything else—is…

…making sure we live and work in places, and among people, that make luck inevitable.

L.F

(Read this article on Medium.)

(#045) Where Great Enterprises Are Borne