Breaking down the equation for “overnight success”

“Timing, perseverance and 10 years of really hard work will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” — Biz Stone.

There is no overnight success without an exceptional background story. The saying goes that it takes 10 years, at least, to be an “overnight success”. Another one is that it takes 7 failures to make it big.

While I sure have over 10 years of entrepreneurial experience (not all on the same venture though) and also have had my sheer amount of failures, I wouldn't say that I’m any closer to becoming an overnight success, if you define that type of success in business as reaching the heights of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, or Elon Musk (just to name a few).

The equation of success in business

I see success as a combination of factors — an equation of sorts — that leads to a tipping point where one might attain recognized and sustainable success (at least for a while).

SUCCESS = GRIT + LUCK

GRIT: Perseverance driven by an unflinching motivation is at the core of having grit. This is the fuel for the tremendous effort it will take to start a business and take it to unbelievable heights.

Very few people haven’t worked their asses off (pardon my French) to get at the top. Not only do you have to work hard, but you also need to be able to cope with failure. This takes a huge amount of energy and requires believing in what you’re doing and to being incredibly strong in the face of adversity and failure. And you will likely fail more often than you think before you will succeed.

“Success is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” — Thomas Edison.

The more you will fail, the more you will learn. The more you learn, the more you tweak your business model and processes to maximize success. But failure takes its toll, and you need to keep your spirits up without burning out to become uber successful.

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” — Winston Churchill

LUCK: Very few people don’t attribute their success mostly by being at the right time at the right place out of pure luck.

“You need lucky breaks to be successful. … To create a business you’ve got to, initially, work day and night, weekends. It’s really hard work. But lots of people do that and do not succeed. And, so, those who have succeeded do need to thank our lucky stars for the breakthroughs that got us to the top.” — Richard Branson

Luck isn’t JUST luck

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” ― Seneca

In other words:
LUCK = PREDISPOSITION + OPPORTUNITY

If you don’t have what it takes to deliver you will fail when it’s your time to step up to the opportunity. That’s if you have the right predisposition.

If you don’t have the right opportunity of course, you will never know if you could have made it.

You also might never get the right opportunity if you have an irrelevant predisposition. In Luck, you can control your predisposition, to some extent, but you rarely control the opportunity. The opportunity is the lucky part in Luck.

No predisposition, no luck. Having the right predisposition is essential to success.

Here is how I see predisposition in the business context:
PREDISPOSITION = VISION + VALUE

VISION: To make it big, you usually need to see big. There are very few founders of Fortune 500 companies that didn’t see big. Vision is also the ability to see an opportunity in the marketplace and to decide to work on it and to give it all you’ve got.

Here is the vision that the founders of Google had when they started out in 1998:

“Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.” ― Larry Page

VALUE: Vision without value, context of business, is like having a product without a market. You need to deliver value to someone to create a transaction, and to start transforming a vision into a business. Value is derived from your expertise, your products, or your services. Value usually requires having a great team of people that build that value and support your success.

Value is what you sell. Vision is why you created value in the first place.
Vision + Value create relevance. Relevance is essential to having a successful business, regardless of its size.

Understand what you can control to maximize your professional success

To summarize:
SUCCESS = GRIT + VISION + VALUE + OPPORTUNITY

You can control:
GRIT: This is you, your personality, what you do every day when you wake up to keep yourself motivated and to keep on going onwards and upwards regardless of the obstacles.
VISION: This comes from you, from your intuition, or your judgment, this is what makes you believe you’ll be successful and relevant in the marketplace.
VALUE: This is what you do or you make that make people and organizations want to give you their money.

“Talent alone won’t make you a success. Neither will being in the right place at the right time, unless you are ready. The most important question is: ‘Are you ready?’” ― Johnny Carson

Are you ready?