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Luck is a huge factor in business. But being aware when you’ve been dealt a good hand is a skill you can learn. In business as in life most of the time we don’t get to choose the hand we’re dealt. We don’t get to choose our parents, our nation, our socioeconomic background, how other people perceive us, our innate abilities, etc.
Let’s continue with this poker metaphor to illustrate how being aware of luck is a skill that can help in business. In poker knowing how relatively good your hand is, is crucial to winning. The fact that Sock Club became a successful business feels like such happenstance and luck. But it was built on the back of many failures. Depending on how you count Sock Club was probably the 5th business that I legitimately tried to build. All that failure made me keenly aware of how hard business was and how hard it was to acquire customers.
So, when I built the website for Sock Club and it got indexed by Google and was getting a few emails a day of interested customers, I knew this was not an average hand. It wasn’t pocket aces but it wasn’t nothing either. It would have been super easy to have not pursued the business more, “a few emails that will never be a real business” many would say. Noah even did a calculation in our early days of how much money we were making per hour spent and it was definitely not much, a few dollars maybe.
Those early wins snowballed into bigger ones, and now Sock Club is a 60+ person company, and still growing. I feel extremely lucky for how successful Sock Club has been, and it has made my life better than I could have imagined as a boy who grew up in Kentucky and wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I guess the takeaway is: you’ve got to try things and get a feel for what’s a good hand, and start to be aware of when you’ve been lucky.
