The Worms Who Won: Turning Dirt into Gold
When I was a little kid, seeing wealthy people made me think, “Oh, how lucky they are!” — this naive thought was coming from someone who didn’t know much about wealth and was just at the beginning of learning more about life and success.
However, this simple idea changed when I went to school, and then, years later, I started my own very first business adventures. I learned the truth about making money — it takes hard work to build a fortune, it’s not just luck.
Now, after launching a dozen businesses that mostly failed, I am ready to admit — it takes both, and here is why.
Hard Work vs. Luck: Cause and Effect
My first attempt at starting a business was driven by youthful enthusiasm and the belief that hard work is key to making a fortune. This idea came from school, where we were taught that success was solely due to hard work. After several hardworking years and still no business success, I realized that luck is also very important. This realization led me to dive deeper into the complexities of causality.
Causality theory explores how certain events (causes) lead to other events (effects). This helped me understand that success is not merely the result of labor (a simple cause) but also involves multiple, often unpredictable factors (complex causes).
Understanding causality has become my North Star in navigating my entrepreneurial journey. The lesson was clear: performing your job consistently and adaptively can transform your world, creating new opportunities through the principle of cause and effect.
For those curious to explore more on this concept, particularly how it influences our understanding of the world from both a philosophical and practical perspective in a business context, I recommend “Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference” by Judea Pearl.
The Unpredictable Business Landscape
In the world of business, as in any other complex activity, there is an insane variety of factors influencing the outcome. We can’t control all of them, and often we don’t even see some of them, making it impossible to factor them into our plans for success.
Business is full of complexities, much like life itself. I’ve learned from hard experience that missing crucial elements can greatly alter results. This unpredictable nature of business is what makes it both exciting and intimidating.
Here, books like “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman can provide some very useful insights into how our decision-making processes handle (or fail to handle) such complexities.
Why Business Isn’t Just a Numbers Game
Every time I hear an expert or business consultant promote their rational and standardized approach to business — as if following a recipe could guarantee success — I can’t help but laugh. Such advice suggests that doing things in a sane and proper way, just as many others have, will guarantee the same results.
This strategy might work well in an Excel spreadsheet, where conditions are ideal and variables can be controlled. However, real-world business is far less predictable, and what seems perfect in a digital model often fails to account for the complexity and unpredictability of actual market conditions.
This skepticism makes me view most books with success stories motivating but not necessarily practical. They’re like maps of shifting lands — great for inspiration but often ineffective in real-life situations.
The Balance of the Chaos and Opportunity
The best way to handle the uncertainties of entrepreneurship is by mixing careful planning with a readiness for chaos. We need to acknowledge our “blindness” — recognize our limits and the many unpredictable factors involved. The key is to make the best decisions we can right now, since that’s all we really control. By consistently making positive changes, we prepare ourselves for when fortune decides to smile upon us. Without luck, we are but “blind worms”, yet even in blindness, there is the potential to dig through to spectacular discoveries.
Entrepreneurship is about balancing careful decisions with the unexpected turns life throws at us. Along the way, we collect unique stories, experiences, and lessons. With insights from our successes and failures, and from both planned strategies and unforeseen events, we can tackle our business ventures with a comprehensive view.
In the end, even though we might feel small like “worms” in the huge business ecosystem, the right mix of hard work and good fortune can make even worms win big, turning the ordinary dirt of daily efforts into the gold of realized dreams.
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