Omar Zenhom pushes back on the idea that successful people are just lucky. After two decades building businesses, he argues luck only matters if you're already prepared: you have to show up, learn, and keep going when things fail. Genuine effort aligned with what people actually want, plus persistence, is what actually works.
There's a video going viral right now that has nearly 1 million views that made me genuinely angry. This video is titled "The Diary of a CEO Is Making You Less Successful." The central argument around this video is that successful people are just basically lucky, and that's why they're successful. I spent the last 20 years building businesses, and in that experience, it taught me one thing above everything else, and that is the people who succeed are not the luckiest. They're the most prepared when luck arrives. I've watched people succeed. I've watched people fail. I've watched people almost make it and then quit at the last moment. But I've never, not once, seen someone put in years of genuine, consistent, focused effort on something the market wanted and walked away with nothing. Not once. I've seen plenty of hardworking people face setbacks, but the people who keep going, kept learning, who kept showing up, and found a way through it every single time. They succeed. And if success is mostly luck, that pattern would not exist.
