Seth Godin on the Luck Factor
Seth Godin has run his classic post on Factor L in his blog. He has been an inspiration for me for a long time, and this post tells you why.
I just cannot resist quoting him:
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Why do some products and services succeed while others fail? Why do some ideas go viral, rocketing across the marketplace, while others wither and die in obscurity? …. We’d all love to know the series of steps to follow, the calculus we need to run, the hoops we need to go through in order to launch a product or service that is guaranteed to succeed. It would save us a lot of angst and disappointment if we could put our hearts and souls into something with a reasonable expectation of success. It used to be that way, of course. If you had a very good product and a fairly sophisticated ad campaign (and enough money to keep both of them going), you could buy attention and turn it into market share. Creating new products was largely about having the will (and the means) to get your market to sit up and notice. Today, it feels like more of a crapshoot. We live in a world of fashion, not rational computation. A world where everything from brake linings and ball bearings to clothes and airlines is chosen for unpredictable reasons. The way to grow in the future is to acknowledge how important luck is and to diversify your risk. Do that with lots of products, not just one or two. Cut your overhead so you have plenty of chips, ready for another spin of the roulette wheel. |
Priceless advice.