INBOUND Bold Talks: Darren Rowse "Serendipitous Success: 7 Habits of Lucky Entrepreneurs"

So I was in the right place at the right time. It was a rainy Friday afternoon in November 2002, and a voice came out of the computer that I was sitting in front of. The voice said, rather embarrassingly, master, you've got mail. I was 13 years younger than I am today. I'd never have something on my computer like that today. But I checked my email account and there was an email from a friend, Steve. It only had four words in it. It's the kind of email that you would gloss over and not really pay any attention to. But it made me a little bit curious. The four words were, check out this blog. And then there was this link. I'd never heard the word blog before. It was 2002. And so I was a little bit curious about what a blog was and I clicked the link. And in that instant of clicking the link, I changed the trajectory of my life in ways that I couldn't have even imagined at the time. To cut a 13 year story short, I started a blog that day. Today I'm a full time blogger and I've built a business around blogging. I'm not the biggest or the best blogger in the world. There are bigger and better bloggers in this room and at this conference. But 5 million people every month come to my blogs today. I have the opportunity to make their lives a little bit better in different ways. And I build a business around it. I often wonder about that moment that I clicked that link. What would have happened if I hadn't clicked it, what would have happened if I'd ignored that email? Or what would have happened if that email came in 2012 rather than 2002. It turns out that 2002 was the best time to start a blog. It was just as there was this rise of interest in new media, as we used to call it back then, and then social media. And I've been surfing that wave ever since. Serendipity was a big part of the building of my business. I was in the right place at the right time. It was a happy accident of sorts. And as I talk to other online entrepreneurs and offline entrepreneurs, I hear the same story. Strategy is always a part of it. Hard work is always a part of it. But there are these moments of luck, moments of serendipity along the way that I keep hearing about in many entrepreneurs stories. And I'm fascinated with it because it's been a part of my journey as well. Not just in that first moment, but many times since. And so I'm always drawn to this Topic of conversation with entrepreneurs and it's interesting. As I've talked to many entrepreneurs over the last 10 years about their lucky moments, I've begun to discover that there are commonalities between a lot of these lucky people. At first I thought they were personality traits. Maybe some people are just born who do things in a way that make lucky things happen to them. But I've come to I guess realize that many of these similarities are actually choices that these people make and they're habits. And so today I want to Share with you 7 habits of lucky Entrepreneurs. I was going to call this talk how to Get Lucky, but I thought it might bring a different kind of crowd. So I'm kind of glad looking at you. You look like good people. So, seven habits of Lucky entrepreneurs and I've only got like a minute and a half for each one, so we're going to be brief. The first one is I've noticed that they are avid learners. Most of the lucky entrepreneurs I've come across don't have high educational qualifications. Most of them are readers listening to podcasts, going to conferences. Many of them have multiple mentors. Many of them are part of mastermind groups. And when you have a coffee with these people, they just pepper you with question after question after question. They can't help but gather information. What's going on here, I think is similar to what this rather ill looking man, Seneca, a Roman philosopher, once said. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. And I think what's happening here with this avid learning is part of the preparation. When you have knowledge, you're in a much better position to make lucky educated guesses. When you have knowledge, you're much more likely to notice the anomalies and the opportunities that come and know how to leverage them. When you have knowledge, you're able to join dots that have previously been disconnected. Knowledge and the gathering of information is part of the journey. The second habit that I've noticed is that these lucky entrepreneurs are fascinated with problems. They're very optimistic about problems. Whilst you and I might run away from problems screaming or complaining, the lucky entrepreneur embraces them. They see problems not as roadblocks, but as springboards into opportunity, as signals of solutions. The way that they respond to problems is the third habit. They practice, curiosity. Curiosity is not a personality trait. It's actually something that you can decide to do. Many of the people who I'm thinking of when they encounter a problem in their own life or in the life of someone else, they tackle it by playing with the problem, teasing it, if you will. And they often start by asking what if? Questions about the problem. What if we did this? What if that happened? By teasing the problem, they begin to hypothesize. And often the light bulb moment happens. But light bulb moments are not enough. Light bulb moments remain in our head unless we begin to experiment. And this is the fourth habit that I see in many of these lucky entrepreneurs. They're prolific. They constantly are experimenting, getting the ideas out of their head in little ways to test them, looking for the answers to the what if questions, testing their hypothesis. The experiments are so important, but they don't just experiment. They actually create space after the experiment to watch for sparks of opportunity that might come. And this, I think, is really crucial. We live in a time and a place where it's so easy to shove activity into every second of our life. Every minute of our life is accounted for with some kind of activity. The problem with this is that if we get so busy, we actually don't create space to see the little opportunities that come our way. In my experience, a lot of people don't get lucky because they don't have space to see the opportunities that come to them. One of the things that I try to do every day just before I go to bed is ask myself two questions. I usually do it in bed, so sometimes it's not so successful. I fall asleep before I finish it, but it's a little meditation that I do. And I simply ask myself the question, what did I do today that gave me energy? And what did I do today that seemed to give other people energy simply by asking those two questions? I've noticed all kinds of sparks when we pay attention to the things that give us energy and the things that give energy to those around us. There are opportunity in those little sparks. Your next big thing might be the tiny, small thing that's staring you in the face right now. But if you're too busy to notice it, that lucky moment passes. The sixth habit that I've noticed in many lucky entrepreneurs is that they create time to build, construct, initiate. Most people don't spend much time on this. I think this is the thing that separates successful entrepreneurs from 99.9% of all people. Most of us live our lives in what I would call a responsive mode. We are responding to the agendas, the expectations, the demands, and the requests of other people. This is why most people work jobs for other people. This is why we spend so much time in our email responding to the questions and requests of other people. There's nothing wrong with doing this, being responsive is a good thing. But the most successful entrepreneurs spend more of their time in what I would call constructive mode. Building, creating, initiating. The last habit of lucky people that I want to just briefly touch on today is that they are quick to pivot. Success is rarely the result of traveling in a straight line. Almost every successful entrepreneur I've ever met tells stories of doing one thing and then ending up doing another thing. Sometimes the pivots are massive 180 degree turns, but many times they're just small pivots, small changes in trajectory that don't actually lead to much in the short term. But when you go in the long term, they actually take you to a very different place. And the question, I guess I ask you today is, are you evolving? Someone asked me a question the other day that kind of was really quite confronting to me. They said to me, are you doing the same thing today that you were doing this time last year in exactly the same way? If you are, it may be a signal that you're in a rut. It may be a signal that there's a problem. We need to continually evolve. What you are doing today is just version 0.1 of what you will end up doing. As I Look at these 7 habits of lucky people and it's by no means a definitive list, and I'd love to hear what you'd add to it later. It strikes me that these things are not personality traits. They these things are choices. Lucky entrepreneurs choose to spend time learning. They choose to see and respond to problems with curiosity. They choose to experiment and choose to use their time doing experiments. But they also choose to create space, to see the sparks that fly As a result of those experiments. They choose to spend considerable time creating, initiating, constructing, and they choose when the opportunity comes to pivot. I was quite confronted with this list a couple of years ago when I first began to think about this and decided to do a bit of an experiment to take my own advice. And so I decided to design my ideal week. This is what I came up with. It's way too complicated to go through in any kind of bullet points, but you can look at it later in the slides. But what you'll see there in that schedule, my ideal week, are the seven activities that I've talked about in different ways. I've decided to start making appointments with myself. Literally an alarm goes off all week telling me what to do next, to choose to do these things. And I have to say that since I've started to do these things, all kinds of opportunities have come, particularly the meditation I do at the end of the day, asking those questions, looking for the sparks of opportunity. They certainly have come. These are choices that we can make. And I would encourage you to ask yourself the question, how are you using your time? What habits are in your life that take you towards the goals that you have? I encourage you to choose luck. Thank you.