Lucky or smart?

Ahh…books are good. Chapters, borders, indigo, barnes and noble and all bookshops are good. Amazon.com too. Heck, even eBay is a good bookshop sometimes (I have to drop ebay into every blog entry I make .

Yesterday before and after meeting up with a friend in downtown Toronto I went to the Chapters in the eaton centre shopping mall. I like going to the super bookshops for two reasons – they usually have a Starbucks, and they allow people to just sit around and read books they haven’t bought. It’s sort of like a library for new books except you can’t leave with them (that would be stealing). With Starbucks there too it’s just the perfect place for a person like me to read, sit in front of a laptop and look busy while watching people, just chill and basically loiter around. Nice.

I usually head to the business books section and see if I can find a few neat entrepreneur or business biography books. I’m more into the anecdotal story type books, not the boring textbooks on sales, marketing, donald trump…etc etc. Sometimes I stumble across a book small enough that I can finish it in an hour or two. The less-than-hundred-pages-but-I’d-never-spend-$20-on type books. I read ‘who moved my cheese‘ in a couple of hours at Borders in Brisbane City once.

This time I picked up a new book, ‘Lucky or Smart? : Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life‘ by Bo Peabody. Bo started Tripod, one of the first services I ever used on the Internet when I first went looking to build a website. For those that don’t know, Tripod offers website hosting and a web site building tool for people that don’t know HTML. At least that’s what they did back in 99 when I looked them up. I actually ended going with one of their rivals, GeoCities (which later was purchased by Yahoo!) to host and build my first ever website. Needless to say Bo became quite rich when Tripod was purchased by Lycos.

Bo’s book was an interesting read. Very light but it had a few noteworthy lessons for entrepreneurs that are worth recounting here.

1. Beware the EGO. Watch your own ego and learn to work with other egos. In other words, don’t take things personally.

2. Be courteous in all business dealings, even if other people are being bastards. You never know when courteous actions will come back to benefit you in the future.

3. Don’t believe the hype. Don’t over digest news and media about the industry you are interested in. Focus on what you do and don’t change it to try and catch on to the latest thing as reported in the press. The press is two months old anyway.

And his main point – be smart enough to know when you are lucky rather than smart. Often your friends, family, peer groups, the media and everyone around you will call you a genius when something you do is successful. The reality could be that you just happened to do something at the right time and right place. A good entrepreneur knows how to take action to create opportunities to become lucky. Then when luck strikes he uses that awareness to build on it.

Yaro Starak
Young Entrepreneur