Persistence or luck?

When I was younger, I used to joke about how it would be better to be lucky than smart. I imagined a life where one waltzes from one stroke of good luck to another, getting rid of the pesky need to fail, just one big rainbow of good fortune sending me on the way to success. How charming would that life be!

Looking back, I would tell myself that while true luck remains impossible to predict, that there is a lot I could do to tip chances of success in my favour by harnessing the power of persistence.

Persistence is not sexy. It is gritty. It is hard work.

Persistence means you keep going when things fail. With good luck, one might not fall down but with persistence, when you stumble, you pick yourself up, dust off the dirt and keep going. You have to just keep going.

Jack Ma famously applied to and was rejected by Harvard Business School 10 times. He was also the sole applicant out of 24 people that did not get hired for a day job at KFC. While we all like to hear about Jack, the incredibly successful billionaire founder of Alibaba, the more valuable lesson lies in knowing the Jack that spent almost every morning for 9 years giving tours outside a hotel in Hang Zhou with the goal of improving his English. Most of us would consider him a lucky man today, but I think that this does him a disservice as his real magic lies is his ability to relentlessly persist over odds stacked against him.

The value of persistence is particularly pronounced today whether you are trying to raise capital as a founder, launch a new business as an entrepreneur or hold on to an investment thesis as a fund manager.

Luck is easy to come by in the sunshine but when the storm rolls in, persistence is your life raft.

For me the key in creating good fortune lies in building an internal resilience which generates positive outcomes over time.

Here are some lessons that stood out to me:

• Create a safe space to fail. It is human and natural to fail. Find (or create) a tribe that is solution driven and supportive for periods of uncomfortable growth and lean on your friends and family when you need a pick me up.

• Reframe outcomes and reactions to failure. We should see a set back as a lesson one can harness towards success instead of a reason to give up. Keep going, keep fighting.

• Get comfortable with patience. Things take time. Good things can take a lot longer than we like to work itself out.

• Trust yourself. Trust yourself. TRUST YOURSELF.

By growing good habits around resilience we might be able to change outcomes in our endeavours.

In the end, perhaps the key to good luck for ourselves, lies within ourselves.