Luck Never Made Your Buck, Patience Is the Only Arbitrage There is no set mantra for success but the ingredients are set in stone

Luck is a curious, intangible beast, impossible to measure yet loosely suggested. Some entrepreneurs deny its existence, yet what else can it be when Mark Zuckerberg - a little boy from the white plains in New York assumes a demi-god like status in the business community? It never takes long for the wheels to come off, not for an entrepreneur, no. At the very get, an employee goes or a bad review, poor product timing perhaps & boom goes the dynamite.

So luck is it -- is that what we need? Let's debunk this thought, should we?

Perhaps this is cliche, but hey, cliches are cliche for a reason, right? It is long said that luck is a combination of preparation & opportunity. I find this to be very profound. So what does it really mean? Gary Player once said, "The harder I practice, the luckier I get."

With a little talent, if you practice your craft of passion 16 hours a day, every single day, for 10 years; you will be insanely great at what you do! Period. And in those 10 years, you will get heaps of opportunities for which if you practised hard enough, you will close!

The question you've got to ask yourself is - are you working 16 hours a day? Are you working when nobody is watching?

No one ever got lucky; it is the work they did that earned them that element of luck.

When billionaire Mark Cuban also touted as the 'luckiest guy in the world' (sic.), sold his company Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for over 5.7 billion$, the only thing the world went on about was his luck and sure, Broadcast was certainly not worth 5BN$ but all the scrapping that Cuban did for 20 years leading onto that point was seldom talked about.

There is no set mantra for success but the ingredients are set in stone. Any venture that is fuelled by passion & diligence has already won 50% of the battle. That backed up by sensibility in timing, concept and a fired up team, and you're 90% there, the remaining

10% is luck. And funnily enough, the 10% always comes after the 90%.

Luck is a variable of work.

India's famous son, Sachin Tendulkar made his test debut for the nation at the age of 16 -luck would you say? As famously narrated by Harsha Bhogle - "He played 55 games in a row as a 14-year-old. He would practice for 2 hours, play a game, practice for 2hours and fall asleep on the dining table and do that 55 days in a row". That's work ethic!

Not many can replicate Tendulkar's talent, but you can certainly replicate his desire.

If you got dealt a great hand at Poker & win a million $, yeah you got lucky but anything else comes down to hard work & of course, patience. That's the second piece I think needs talking about. Through all my experiences of running 5 startups in the last 8 years, I've come to realize patience is the only arbitrage. When I started out aged 17, I wanted to succeed in one or two years because of which every decision I took was shortsighted which proved detrimental to my companies. I failed so many times before I realized this. In a world where every 19 year old wants to be a founder & everyone wants the riches of entrepreneurship -- your only arbitrage is to think long term.

Truth is, you will never know the micro, till you don't know what you want in the macro.

If it were so easy, everybody would have it. Remember, it isn't easy to follow the footsteps of luck, for its access is due to only those who are willing to pay the price. But hey, at the end of the day, the only constant thing about luck is that -- it changes.