Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways Experience compounds; it cannot be erased by failure, loss or starting over.
Be honest about what you want, master your craft and be ready when luck appears.
Is it true that big money is just luck? My answer is somewhere in the middle. It’s really hard to make it in business without luck, but if you bet only on luck, you’ve already lost.
Look at crypto investors or day traders with their stories of sudden wealth. A guy invested his last money in a coin, it skyrocketed, and he made two hundred thousand in a week. Now he walks around bars like a hero and believes he has caught a lucky streak forever. But this is just a regular casino in digital packaging.
What happens next? He continues to play, confident in his genius, and in a month, he has nothing left because he has no knowledge base to fall back on.
I love the old saying: “You can drink away your intelligence, but you can never drink away your experience.” At the beginning of your journey, you have to work with your hands and learn the hard way at every step.
When success becomes a trap for an entrepreneur
I started my career in business very early, when I was only twenty years old. In 2004, I received an exclusive contract to distribute Polaroid safety glasses throughout Ukraine. For four years in a row — in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 — I received the prestigious “Best Distributor in the World” award.
Imagine the scale: my main competitors worked throughout the expansive territory of Russia, where nine large distributors operated simultaneously, while I was alone in Ukraine and sold as much as all of them combined.
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