Making Your Own Luck

Gary Player once remarked "It's funny, the more I practise, the luckier I get". So should a failed entrepreneur be given a second chance? The argument goes that you learn valuable learn valuable lessons from failure, so you should be more likely to succeed second time around. But others argue that experience gained from one failed business is unlikely to apply to a second, due to the unpredictability of chance. "You can't learn to win the lottery" No, but if you are lucky you can influence the amount you win (my tip, don't select the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 as 10,000 others have then!).

Getting into a position to profit from being a little bit lucky is probably was differentiates successful entrepreneurs, but no one is lucky all of the time. So whether you eventually profit from a bit of good business fortune is very much down to the experience of the management team. All you can do is deal yourself a good hand, but whether you win a particular pot or hole a specific putt is partially down to fate. Embracing this risk is what equity investing is all about. So if anyone says they have only been associated with success they have either are a one-trick pony or very, very lucky! In business, lessons are best learned from those who have been mainly successful...