Too many people set up businesses or even their lives and lifestyles on “que sera sera”, whatever would be would be. In the words of Paul Adefarasin, “whatever will be, won’t be, until you insist it’s got to be”
When you ask an average Nigerian who has made it to come on stage to explain how he made, he’d say, “its grace o”. Every time we say that, we lose the ability to pass on the steps we took for someone else to learn and duplicate same. . When it comes to business, I think we are overselling and depending on this thing called luck and grace. The tallest tree in the forest didn’t grow to become the tallest tree by luck or just because it was just meant to be the tallest tree. The tallest tree grew that way because it was first of all a good seed, and then there was no other tree drastically blocking its sunlight, no one came across its path to cut it down and that the surrounding soil was more fertile and it understood how to leverage it for extraordinary growth. Luck and grace is not that fictitious and unexplainable concept. It’s a dependent variable with loads of independent variables that contribute to it. In the case of the tree, those variables make up the real luck. It’s logical. Success in life, including luck can be very logical.
Africans have a culture for superstition. An average business man in Nigeria has someone interceding for him, there’s a group dependent on fetish rituals for luck, and then another group of religious people in search of anointing for grace. Either one, what I see is still the same mentality of microwaves. It’s just different faces of the same coin. Look around you, you’d see a sudden explosion of churches and betting sites and centers. They are both promoters of luck and grace. I read a report that clearly uses data to show how the top 20 poorest countries happen to be the most religious (with exemptions to America), how the top 20 most prosperous countries have the least belief on any religion People want everything fast but Success requires process. We need to teach process and not just result by luck. We need a generation of people and businesses that understand structures and processes. Success is more attainable and sustainable as that.
We got here as a county because of the lack of process, the oil curse came from selling oil without processing it. In the same vein, we don’t process or follow through on our thoughts too.
You can create and increase luck. It’s by preparation and intentional structures. As you keep preparing opportunities would begin to spring forth. The keyword is preparation. I have this conversation all the time with my wife and let me be practical with it here. We have just welcomed our first child. And I keep thinking, if from an early age, we give him a chance to travel round the globe (exposure), expose him to good music, intentional and creative play (creative intelligence) he learns to speak 5 languages (social leverage) including the emerging Chinese Mandarin (trendy). And then we introduce him to principles, God and reality (depth). Open up his mind (vision), gets him to make connections early in life with other kids of successful parents in his international school (networking), and still allow him mingle with the streets and his village (localization). And then show him what he can be by getting to be close to a great leader in his field of interest (mentorship), does that give him more chances and luck to succeed?
Most times, success can be so logical that your ability/inability to succeed in life comes from a huge difference of when, how and where we grew up. This is same as business. As we build enterprises, never leave luck to luck. You can create luck, that’s what successful people do.
Too many people depend on luck, they depend solely on grace and even prayers without work or even understanding the essence of value. Success, wealth and greatness doesn’t come from that. It comes from either generating or being a channel of transmitting value. I used to ask God to bless me, but nothing happened. Then I changed my prayer line, from “God Bless Me to “The World Will Be Blessed through Me” and everything began to change. I used to wake up every morning to ask God for a better day. And it hit me that today won’t be better. It’s going to just be another yesterday if I did the same thing I did yesterday. This helps me think differently.
The highly successful game console of the 90s was called Nintendo. The name comes from a Japanese word which means, “Leave luck to heaven”. Please do. God gave you a head, so you can give him rest. I believe God’s work is to be God, not to do for man what man should do for himself. A lot depends on us. Fortunes and failures are answerable to the same principle of intentionality. We fail to plan then we plan to fail. Like I love to say, anyone can fall off a ladder by accident but no one climbs a ladder by accident. Our rise and fall is not also by the ladder but how we climb it. But some people have resulted in blaming the ladder which is not a variable but a constant. The main metaphor is that the root of poverty comes from a mindset that transfers responsibility from self to another being or force. In Nigeria, ours is luck, God or someone we know. When things don’t work out, we back the mirror to blame the government, we blame the market, and we blame the competition and sometimes even blame life. These things are mathematical constants as they affect everyone. So while some succeed regardless means that they did something different than we did.
Everybody wants to be successful, everyone is interested. It’s not by being interested but by invested, and this type of commitment takes processes. We have to reverse this else we might just be building a new generation of guys who don’t understand the concept of work!
If there was one true ingredient to luck, it would be preparation. They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity. As cliché as that sounds, its true regardless. People just need to be more prepared. Preparations can make you lucky. I read of a man who was not considered talented. He was even once stoned and booed off stage in a freshman’s year concert in Hampton. They introduced him as John Stephens and the crowd didn’t know or like him. He got off that stage back to the studio, he stayed there for years. And a few years later, he returned with multiple Grammy Awards and a name, John Legend!
People quite when they don’t make it at first attempt. It’s just the making of the first times. Every body’s first work was crappy, even Da Vinci’s art and Jean Michel’s build up to Basquiat’s graffiti paintings. The Beatles used to be an ordinary Rock Band in the UK. Tired of the cycle of ordinary, they left London for Hamburg. And within that period, between1960 to1964, they kept getting better by performing over 1 200 times at Live in Hamburg. So by the time they came back to England, history has it that they performed like no other. Today, they are the most successful music group of all time. The more you practice the luckier you get.
One may ask, what of the times when we do all the right things and still end up in the wrong place. Well, take it that you didn’t lose, you learnt. Last 2 years I lost a mentee to an avoidable accident the pole of the goal keeper’s post fell on him and he collapsed and died. The late Niyi just wanted to work out, he hadn’t done anything wrong. That was my first realization that “you can do all the right things and still end up in the wrong place”. I call such Outlier events.
My first instinct in times of outlier events usually is, “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)”. Sometimes we know too much enough for it to lead us to realize how little we know. You can do all the right things and still end up in the wrong place. When this happens, if you do nested thinking via backward integration on regression analysis, not on the victim, someone else might have done something wrong, that cancelled out all your rights (which might have been the case with Niyi) Maybe I am just doing a meaningless analysis paralysis. Maybe it might be other people, but most times, there’s a human error. This is because someone somewhere did a wrong that have affected our right. If we could just pay a little more attention to excellence, especially for the sake of others. We can all set things up right.
We set up so we don’t have a setback. But sometimes we come back even after a good set up. It’s called a setback. At that point, a setback becomes a set up for a comeback. We may comeback to have another set up, but there is no coming back on some wrong set up.
Keep setting up regardless. When you play long enough in the preparation and skill field, luck will happen. You are already lucky to see this or be here. But you become more tangibly lucky by taking it. I look forward to working with you and making you luckier, with life and your business.
Eizu Uwaoma
