Luckiness and Playfulness in Entrepreneurial Thinking

Note: this post was originally written for and published on the 1388 Consulting blog.

My favorite successful entrepreneurs are those who have the humility to acknowledge what a big role “luck” has played in their success. Those who no matter how hard or how smart they worked, recognize that the same paths and opportunities available to them were simply not available to many others who worked just as hard and just as smart.

But our understanding of luck should not be simply about what external circumstances are — or are not — available. There is something about luckiness that requires us to look inwards as well. As the saying goes:

“luck is where opportunity meets preparation.”

But what is that preparation? I feel like a lot of people interpret this to mean hard work. Just a lot of very hard work. While that is certainly part of it, I’m afraid that it may not be the whole picture. Paradoxically, by focusing solely on working hard, we may find ourselves at times being too busy to get lucky.

Are you too busy to be lucky?

Dr. Richard Wiseman has done a lot of interesting research on luck. Consider this experiment that he describes:

“I gave both [self-described] lucky and unlucky people…