Title: Make Your Own Luck
Author: Bob Miglani & Rehan Yar Khan
Publisher: FingerPrint Publication
Genre: Self Help, Non-Fiction
First Publication: 2019
Language: English
Book Summary: Make Your Own Luck
What does it take to have a successful sales career? What does it take to create a billion dollar startup? and What does it take to move up and get promoted in your corporate career? What does it take to succeed in life?
It takes luck. Yes, some people are born into it. Some people fall into it.
This book, for the first time, shares insights by two people──one, a startup founder and investor in India; and the other, a successful executive of a Fortune 500 company in the US──on how to increase the odds of success.
You don’t have to be born into luck. You now have a chance to make your own.
Whether it is landing the ideal job, surpassing your sales goals, or generating that billion-dollar startup idea, or finding ways to grow your business, you need an edge, an advantage—“luck accelerators” that help you and your business stand out, boosting you to new heights.
Visualise the result of your goals so clearly that the image pulls you toward it every day.
Learn why it is not good enough to be better—instead, you need to be different. Understand why you don’t need a plan B, but instead need multiple plan As; what it means to have a Beginner’s Mind; and many other insights that you need to practise to increase your odds of success.
Also, read the stories behind what it took to write the first investment cheques into today’s unicorns—Ola and Druva— when they were unknown and struggling for revenue.
Stop waiting for luck to come into your life. Start making your own luck.
Book Review: Make Your Own Luck
Make Your Own Luck is about understanding how to disentangle luck and skill when evaluating performance, and the implications of making predictions in different environments. Lots to think about here, and the authors Bob Miglani and Rehan Yar Khan did a good job of introducing a few ways to tease out skill from luck. The book discusses a plethora of anecdotal stories of people who have had “good” and “bad” luck in their lives, as well as a number of studies that serve as a more scientific basis for the conclusions. The book doesn’t instruct the reader on how to become luckier in the superstitious sense. Rather, it brings what people often consider as luck into the open and explain how you can be ‘lucky,’ aka ‘successful.’
Nothing focuses your work like
a clear and distinct goal.
Make your goal as specific and
compelling as possible.
Some people simply seem to be in the right place at the right time; just as others seem to reap more than their share of misfortune. Why do some people get more success, while others never seem to be successful? Do special stars shine down upon those who seem to effortlessly win professional success, and personal happiness? Is luck or the lack of it a matter of pure chance? Is good fortune intelligence masquerading as fortune’s whim? All of this information is provided at an engaging pace without reverting to the gee-wiz tricks or over-simplification of the TED generation.
“A tree does not grow in the shade of another.” – Rehan Yar Khan
I’ve read an article about Bill Gates and his success story sometimes back which summarize the author’s claim about Luck and success. Bill Gates made a bad decision early in his career. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that some other people made even worse mistakes, we might not ever have heard of him. Yes, Gates was and is brilliant, and he worked hard. Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, attributes his success to the 10,000 hours he spent mastering computer programming at an early age.
“Doing what is hard is the only path to growth.” – Bob Miglani
There is more to Gates’ success, however, than his talent, hard work, and education. It might be that we know his name only because of his amazing luck as a negotiator. The flip of the coin came up heads for him three times in a row at a critical point in his business life. So it is with any decision: the chain of events that brings you to a choice point will be shaped by luck, good or bad. Prior circumstances may determine whether you’re in a position of power or relative weakness. (For that matter, luck governs whether rain or sun that day will make your mood sour or buoyant.) And the same is equally true for everyone with whom you deal.
Make one new friend a week and your network will blossom exponentially.
Make Your Own Luck is an interesting self-help book and guide on how to create a work environment conducive for “luck” and how to make it work for you. The authors Bob Miglani and Rehan Yar Khan take the readers on a journey on how to foster serendipity and what to do with it once you find it. There are many interesting cases in the book. The authors succeed in providing a spectrum of business cases that illustrate in practical terms the application of their approach to serendipity.
