So this is pulled from my response to a discussion board that I follow. The discussion is from Mills-Scofield's Main(e) Points group on Linkedin. Deb's entry was about Luck and included a re-post of an old article on luck...one that I swore was in Blink or Tipping Point...or maybe I read this article when I was reading one of those two books, I don't really know. Regardless.
To quote Deb's entry, "Luck is a trailing indicator - At BIF-6 there was a lot of talk about hiring people who were lucky (Tony Hsieh http://spedr.com/3j32p from Zappos who asks people when hiring how lucky they think they are) - but to some degree, luck is a trailing indicator - the leading indicators are attitude! this shouldn't be a surprise"
Luck is a Trailing Indicator...That is so simply put it's brilliant. Think about it! Luck is a trailing indicator. A+!!! ...a trailing indicator of, "My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good." -Richard Wiseman
So that brought up a memory from my past life as a screen printer and while I told myself that I would only list value or new business ideas in this blog I have to repost my thoughts (my discussion response) because I think the story is important for anyone interested in business making and luck. -At the end I will try to come up with some business idea that has to do with this subject matter. :)
A long time ago before I got myself together I worked at a screen printing company in Kansas. This was your average apparel printing and embroidery company that printed shirts for companies such as Budweiser as well as Big8 universities -that's right, this was before the Big10 kids. The owner, Dan Hix, started the company to teach his son how to run a business. The screen printing company isn't the story...
Dan was one of the founders of Hix Corp. Hix Corp is one of the largest suppliers of industrial apparel printing equipment in the world. They were pioneers in the screen printing industry...later food industry -think pizza conveyor oven tech, its the same thing as a plastisol curing tshirt belt dryer sort of. He was a normal guy. He always wore blue jeans and a white tshirt. He was pretty much your average farm boy, down to earth, midwest guy. He was also crazy successful and wealthy. ...and foul mouthed and brash...sometimes. Anyway Dan spent a lot of time in the factory part of the building hanging out and telling stories while helping with mundane tasks like folding tshirts and boxing up product with me and a guy named Lucky.
That's right the story could only get better with the introduction of a curmudgeon of an old alcoholic printer named Lucky right! No kidding, Lucky was an old townie bar fly. I don't think he ever told me his real name and no one ever called him anything other than Lucky. He used to say, "when I'm printin' I ain't drinkin' and when I'm drinkin' I sure as hell ain't printin' so don't ever ask me if I'm drunk at work cause I ain't." True quote. Another famous, Lucky and Dan story, Dan once offered Lucky a new car to quit drinking. Lucky declined. Lucky rode an old black mountain bike pretty much everywhere. Luck was from Seattle and if not such a drunk might have been a great philosophy professor. Lucky was mean in the morning, but at least he wasn't drunk right? As I have said before, I digress...
One day I ask Dan what's the secret to his success. He tells me the following: "Son my life is like walking through a field full of holes...holes as far as the eye can see. I walk along and skirt around some holes and some holes I just jump into [blindly]. Sometimes the holes are full of shit, sometimes they are not but most of the time they are full money...lots of money." Then he tells me about lucky hunches and the time he sold off most of his ownership in Hix Corp. When he wrote the terms of sale he put in a clause granting him rights to the eastern block/soviet countries. The buyers thought he was crazy and let him have it. He made the sale. A number of years later the wall comes down and the Soviet Union becomes free market and Dan owns the rights to a huge new market craving fashion items. He said everyone thought he was "damn fool crazy" for jumping into that hole full of shit, later they called him lucky. He said you just gotta know which holes to jump in. :)
Ok now somehow I gotta spin some value outta this right? This one is a tough one esp given that I am tired and want to go to bed. I assume the worst, I hope you do too. Here goes: We have heated conveyor industrial dryers, a DUI-guy named Lucky from Seattle, the idea that Luck is a trailing indicator of four distinct mind sets, not the least of which is intuition, and finally a guy who pretty much helped create the screen printed t-shirt industry but only wore white cotton t-shirts with no printing of any kind. hum,
I am too tired to come up with something respectably Pro so perhaps a book of my very odd and ecclectic personal history spun with a strategy + business + design slant. You ask yourself, why, oh God why did I stick with this post so long only to find out that he is going to talk about...ugh...his personal story??!!!?!! LOL I know, I know but you stuck with me this long so hang in there for several more sentences okay! I promise you'll love the book.
Who else knows someone who worked for a crazy lady named Pat the Crocodile lady who owned 32 crocodiles-n-alligators in a crack neighborhood and only paid "employees" with wads of one dollar bills. Never mind that this lady had Macaws and Parrots that cussed like she cussed and chutes and ladders from the first floor to the basement and outside to the yard that held chickens and pheasants. Also rats that were fed to the crocs. One side of the rat cage had hundreds of rats crammed together crawling over each other. The other side of the cage about 6 rats living plushly. What up with the 6 rats? They survived 3 drops onto the snout of a croc so Pat thought they deserved to live the plush happy life forever. The chutes and ladders btw were created so the crocs and gators could move freely about the home and outside during hot KCMO summers. Sometimes you'd go into the back yard and the gators would try to chase you. It was seriously scary. I am not making this up, it was a primo gig that I found on the job board at the Kansas City Art Institute before promptly flunking out (the best thing I ever did btw, seriously). Talk about an entrepreneurial life experience. One day I arrived at crazy Pat's house and she was out front yelling at these huge groups of people who were looting the house across the street. The house was a crack house and had been raided by KCMO's finest the night before. Since everyone in the house had been arrested the neighborhood thought it best to loot the place of any and all valuables. You gotta buy the book to learn why this was a great experience you could learn from.
The last chapter of the book would be about my last days as a design student in Detroit and rubbing belly's for good luck. Specifically it would be about a Humane Society fundraiser that Bob Lutz's wife chaired and that I had the good fortune of being chosen to donate art/design too. The MC of the gala event? Big Ed, that's right, Ed McMahon! I rubbed his belly for good luck and as I told him, "for the good fortune of fellow designers and artists at the Center for Creative Studies, College of Art and Design." What a hoot, he laughed, pulled up his coat to expose his belly, let out that slow Big Ed rumble and said, "be my guest kid." And so I rubbed Ed's belly for good luck, like some sort of pop culture buddha and luck it brought me and many of my good friends who have gone on to do some really great work in business, art and design.
There you go!
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