When was the last time you did something — invested, started a project, engaged in business, sold something — and it turned out better than expected?

I was looking through some old investment paperwork — with an eye towards throwing it away because it was getting too old to save — and it struck me how often I have gotten involved in things that were purported to be "really good," but in the end turned out to be pretty mediocre.

I should make it clear here that I'm not talking about obvious scams that turned into nothingness after tall tales of "how fabulous" they were, I'm talking about what seemed like sound and well thought out projects with a reasonable amount of promise… and which resulted not in some complete loss but just in disappointing results as compared to what I thought and hoped they might do.

You know the kind, perhaps, where you put in $1,000 and three years later you walk away with $1,023. And you think to yourself "what was even the point of THAT?"

As I threw away aforesaid paperwork, it made me realize how much of life ultimately turns out to be pretty average. We might spend a lot of time and effort in the pursuit of excellence and happiness, but so much of what we end up experiencing turns out just so-so.

We don't tend to talk about it because it's not good enough that it's worth celebrating, while at the same time it's not bad enough that we want to file scam reports and rail and stomp our feet against it.

My experience in life has been that success almost never comes easily. Most of the few sincere and sustainable successes I have encountered have been the result of years and years of perseverance and going through a grind that involves particularly bad times as well as modestly good times.

These are generally not the investments or projects we hear about in new stories or in YouTube clips because what makes the news tends to be the one in a million moon shots where somebody got instantly rich overnight.

Of course the problem with those tends to be that they're not reproducible at any kind of scale and — in fact — they were more likely the result of good fortune and pure luck than they were anything to do with investment or entrepreneurial skills.

Much of life seems to work that way.

In business schools at universities it's one of the topics that gets studiously avoided. Nobody talks about how often pure simple dumb luck is a key element in success... primarily because you can't teach luck, and luck is not a skill.

Which brings me back to the whole "better than expected" idea. Experience increasingly leads me to believe that in order for things to turn out better than expected, the secret sauce is a combination of good idea and planning intersecting with the element of really good luck. And that's why it tends to be rare!

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