
“I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
- Thomas Jefferson
I have the quote above engraved on a silver cup that my parents gave me for Christmas ten years ago. It's been on my desk ever since.
Last month you all made a dream of mine come true.
I was invited to stand on the TEDx stage in San Francisco and give a talk on our core message and purpose at Live Your Legend:
How to Find & Do Work You Love.
Five days ago that video was published on YouTube.
As of this morning it had 40,147 views, 447 comments, 1,010 likes, and 15 dislikes. ;) [Update - August 2014: nearly 1,700,000 views!]
One of the members of the TEDx community wrote to me yesterday and said our talk was the #1 trending TEDx talk on YouTube.
On top of that, 1,801 people joined our community here - Welcome to the adventure!
I am still pinching myself as I write this...
So I thought it'd be a worthwhile exercise (both for me and for all of you) to recap exactly how this dream came true and maybe sort out what was blind luck and what might have been luck that was a little more in our control - because with any dream becoming reality, there's a lot of both.
Because more often than not, when things like this happen to people, the world tends to like to dismiss it as, "Oh, he just got lucky," or, "Of course they got to speak and their talk got a ton of traction. Look at the size of his following!" and on and on.
But we must be very careful not to confuse the type of luck we can control with the type that's plain dumb…