Serendipity - the faculty of making fortuitous discoveries by chance

Tweet I have always liked the word serendipity, it is empowering yet it is outside your control.

I just read this amazing article by Bo Peabody: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050101/lucky-or-smart.html, which I really liked. It's long so here are some bits I liked:

On December 31, 1997, I agreed to sell Tripod in exchange for $58 million in stock of a publicly traded company named Lycos.... Over those two years, I watched the value of my Lycos stock increase tenfold... By December 31, 1999, at the height of the bubble and just a few months before the market crashed, I had sold nearly every share of my Lycos stock.

Nice... Thats $580m made from a company that had 0 profit, pretty lucky.

Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies. Why? Because lots of smart people will gather around companies with these qualities.

IMO Anyone who tries doing anything ever thats out of the ordinary has a chance they will get "lucky", and if you never stop trying things you are almost guarenteed to get lucky at some point :-).

And when smart, inspired people gather around a fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive company, they work very hard. And when smart, inspired people work very hard, serendipity ensues.

Goes onto say that its important to have mission statement that appeal to the moral, positive part of us:

Missions such as those... create an aura of authenticity, which is the elixir that attracts smart people and inspires them. There is little authenticity in the modern business world. But it's just the thing that people crave most in their work. When people find themselves aboard one of these vessels, they don't want to get off. They form a fierce protective boundary around it and will do anything to keep the vessel afloat and its inhabitants alive. These people are liberated by finding not only a way to make money but also a way to feel good about it. This is what takes inspiration and turns it into hard work....

Words are incredibly powerful, sometimes causing us to do things that we would never normally do....

A lot was left out of all those articles. The hundred-hour workweeks. The anxiety attacks. The crashed cars and missed planes. The times I had to tell colleagues that we couldn't make payroll. The years of a $12,000 salary. Night after night after night of pasta dinners and stress-relieving Advil "cocktails." The countless meetings with absolute assholes who had no interest in learning about the Internet, the single most significant business innovation of their lifetimes.

I like Bo, he reflect many of my own beliefs (everyone likes themselves :-) ) and says it very eloquently. I will get his book.

I hope everyone has a serendipitous day.