On persistence and making your own luck.

Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant once said "you make your own luck if you stay at it long enough". This is a great statement of humility, because it reminds us all just how much of our successes, failures, fortunes and hardships are driven by luck, coincidence and chance, far beyond talent, intellect or capability.

The trick is in maximising your ability to be lucky and at the heart of that is the quality of persistence. Persistence is like the unsung hero of all success stories - a quality that often determines whether someone achieves their goals or not.

How many times have you seen people give up just as they were about to make a breakthrough? Persistence means pushing through challenges, setbacks, and failures, even when it feels impossible.

Persistence is about the effort and determination of individuals or groups to experiment and find novel solutions, much like evolution and nature’s own intrinsic law of ‘trial and error’ leading to progressive changes over time.

In those Sisyphean-feeling moments when we might consider giving up, what could be a simple reminder about the opportunity of persistence? I like to think of it as blowing up a balloon of good luck.

Inspired from the words of Frank Herbert, during an interview at UCLA in 1985. Describing the nature of scientific exploration… “The surface of the balloon is what we do not know, inside the balloon as we blow into it, is what we have proved okay? But as we increase what we think we know, we increase our exposure to what we do not know. This is one of the inevitable laws of our universe. But isn’t it more interesting, to live in a universe, where there are unknowns?”

Just know that everything is a phase, it’s a shame for the good times and a boon for the bad times. Persistence will carry you through.