What this guy is doing takes a lot of skill: effective marketing, brand building, the online audience, his initial sales, his product instinct, his tech skills. Overall, this guy is super talented and it's obvious he knows how to put in the grind. And he probably has that advantage some humans have where he enjoys doing that.<p>You can do all that and fail. It's true. That's how it works. But about the most pathetic thing to see is someone unsuccessful put down another person's success as just luck. You just know the guy saying it's luck is the excuse maker, the guy who would have succeeded if not for someone, the unaccepted genius misunderstood despite his mastery of comments about how Google always kills projects.<p>And the worst part of it all is that if you read this guy's blog post, you don't get a feeling of "Wow, he really just cracked it!". I got a feeling of "Bloody hell, mate! That's an absolutely <i>tremendous</i> amount of work." Not only did it not seem easy or lucky, but it felt like something I could never do myself. It's so hard, I originally shared it with a friend to show him how hard it is.<p>I do have to credit him with turning this into another content marketing journey, though. Clever ;)
I think it depends on what people mean by lucky. I doubt he would have gotten to 45k/month if lives in North Korea (or many other terrible dictatorships) even if he did just as much hard work. Or maybe just have bad luck/genes and be born with a severe mental disability.<p>Maybe we should have said he wasn’t unlucky instead?<p>Basically just getting to live in a western/first world democracy already makes you luckier then most people on the planet.
Whatever happened to people recognizing luck had a part to play? This ugly "personal narrative" thing that everyone has to do?<p>How is this not seen as the height of cringe?
It's rarely luck alone, off course, someone has to have the guts to play, to risk losing something, and often must put in the work too. But out of everyone who does, luck can often make the winners.<p>That said, in his case, there's a few repeat accomplishments. More than once he thought of a product, built it, and seem to have gotten traction with consumers.<p>This is different from say Jeff Bezos, and how he famously said he doesn't think he could make it again, because he was kind of at the right time, right place. And he wouldn't know what in the current time and place would be the next Amazon.<p>But in OPs case, he seem to be able to replicate these small-ish but still successful products. So at the very least he's got a knack for good ideas, identifying products that don't have a good offering, and building them quickly to a point that people will pay for them. That takes some talent, and hard work to accomplish.
It's the 'I could have done that' vibe. Yes, you might have been physically able to. But you didn't. That you actually did not do it is a pretty good indicator that it is not, in fact, easy.
Luck plays a role in pretty much everything. The key is being happy/successful with the amount of luck you end up getting. Looking at luck as sort of normally distributed, chances are you will have <i>some</i> amount of it and, if you're well positioned, that little luck could propel your life forward.<p>Most people should be thinking about that random day where you'll meet someone who works at your dream company, or an investor, at a party. It will happen once or twice in your life. If it happens tomorrow, are you going to be able to make the best of it?
I never understood why north Americans really don't like being called lucky. I'd rather be lucky any time, anywhere, in any context because you can become a hard worker but can't become lucky