How to Download It's Better To Be Lucky Than To Be Good PDF
I consider myself to be a lucky guy. Maybe other wealthy people knew all along they were going to live fabulous lives. Not me. Every time I drive through the gates of my home in Rancho Mirage and see the stables, the riding arena, the sprawling Mission-style home, the sparkling pool, the acres of lawns, I can't believe this is my life. Was it really possible I had gone from being a Fuller Brush salesman to setting the record on Wall Street for the biggest commission day ever? Had I really served in the White House, entertained a president and a vice president at my home, built two Fortune 500 companies, and owned an NBA basketball team?It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. People ask me: How did you become a successful entrepreneur? I always tell them the same thing: Luck. I’ve been very, very lucky. Most people don't like to hear that. Everybody wants a book, a recipe or a checklist that spells out exactly how to become rich beyond your wildest dreams. But the way I see it, there is no book, no how-to seminar, no MBA program that will pave the road to success. There just isn't.One thing I can tell you for sure: my success had nothing to do with an Ivy League education or family connections. I came from a lower-middle class neighborhood in Iowa, where my father worked in a warehouse and my mother was a homemaker. Neither of my parents had a college education, and I never did well in school. I never got an "A" in my life. Not only didn't I go to a highly regarded college, but I am also a college dropout. And my first business? It went bankrupt, and I lost everything. “Then how did you do it?” people ask. “What is the key to success? How did all this happen to you?" I'll tell you again: Luck. Dumb luck. Seriously. It's not false modesty. It's the truth. I've always thought of life as a stream, and we’re the trout. Here's what I mean. A trout sits near the surface of the water with its snout pointed upstream. It waits, biding its time, to see if anything coming downstream looks like it's worth eating. Every trout is different. What one eats, another won't. And a trout is known to change its menu from day to day. One day it will snag a grasshopper, the next it will let the grasshopper pass and gobble a mosquito for breakfast. But whatever meal that trout picks, once it sees what it likes, it acts, snapping up the food before it passes downstream. Rarely does that trout move from its position or try to chase after even the best morsel once it’s floated past. It just takes what comes at it. It's the same with us. We sit there in the stream, waiting. Every day all sorts of random things flow toward us. We can't control what's coming at us. That’s just plain luck. But what you can control is what you choose to let float past and what’s going to make you snap. If I go after the right fly? Good dinner. If I go after the fly with the hook? Game over.Life is all about making decisions. If you don’t want something, you’ve got to let that stuff flow past. But if you see something you want, you’ve got to follow your instincts and, just like that trout, you’ve got to bite. No hesitations. No second-guessing. Just bite.That's what I've done, and this is my story. It's a story of how I sat in that stream, waiting. It's a story of making decisions and living with the consequences, some good and some bad. But more than anything, it's a story about how I opened wide and bit into what I wanted.
