[burnt_toast]

Why can't it be both? You can work hard and the business can still flop due to things outside of your control.

I started a business a year before Covid hit. I worked hard and did multiple weeks of working 6 - 7 days. Then Covid popped up and my customer base slowly dried up due to people struggling to make ends meet. Working hard wouldn't have prevent Covid.

[safety1st]

Actually, it's neither.

The two most important factors that determine whether a business will succeed are good decision-making and capital.

For example, if you'd had enough cash to finance three years of operating at a loss, your business probably could have survived Covid.

That's how many businesses survived Covid: they had a lot of cash in the bank, and they made the good decision of cutting costs to the bone until demand returned.

There are a hundred little decisions that need to be made wisely, and the businesses that fail are usually the ones that made the wrong choices. Anything that affects margins or your competitive advantage is a huge deal. Smart accounting is the backbone of any business that's built to last.

What type of business to start, of course, is one of those key decisions.

Hard work is remarkably ineffective at moving the needle once you scale up a bit. That doesn't mean you don't have to work hard, you still do, actually when you have something good going on, you tend to realize that you'd be an idiot to screw it up through laziness.

But you only have to hit about a dozen employees to be at the threshold where your personal time makes little difference beyond maybe a few key accounts or something. What will make the difference in the long run is the systems you put in place, which of course comes down to some very nuanced decision-making.

Luck, well of course it helps, until it doesn't, no one's lucky forever.

So I maintain that the name of the game is making consistently good decisions and having access to enough cash to weather any storm.

[is_true]

One of the products I built was profitable because I sent a tweet to some guy, he answered, gave me the contact to some other guy that was in charge of purchases and he told me send me a proposal, which he later accepted.

I would call that 99% luck, because I had done that before in multiple occasions but no one answered.

[bryanlarsen]

> because I had done that before in multiple occasions

Doing something after failing multiple times can be hard work.

[EdgarVerona]

I'd summarize it as:

Hard Work + Market Analysis + (Massive Luck OR Large upfront funding OR Large and relevant network of personal connections) + Luck IRT externalities that can impact your business

I wasted my 20's because I didn't understand the formula above. I worked for a small startup and I thought the idea was great. I worked 80 hours a week and churned out massive improvements to the product as they pivoted over and over trying to find a foothold in the market. But now I realize that the failure was because of both a lack of market analysis and a failure in that third term: we had neither luck nor upfront funding nor a network of REAL connections that could make things happen for us. It was a recipe for disaster: for wasted effort and a wasted era of my life before I woke up and realized how unlikely it was that we would turn the ship around.

The unfortunate part is that the third factor - the Luck or funding or connections factor - is mostly only influenceable by how successful you already were before you started the venture. It is the "success begets more success" factor that is unpopular to talk about among people who want to believe that their success came exclusively from the sweat of their brow.

[persnickety]

Corollary: Luck wins in business (a.k.a. it ain't just about hard work)

[mgh2]

Survivorship bias: https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...

[MaxfordAndSons]

Yea, it certainly isn't all one or the other, but people are on average quite bad at estimating the precise degree to which we have control over uncertain outcomes, and tend to wildly over or under estimate based on emotions, biases and superstitions.

[koala112]

yeah, getting hit by a marco-economic event is sad because you also feel powerless so luck is a part of it