Better Lucky Than Good
Why fortune favours the visible as much as the prepared
Better Lucky Than Good, I heard the phrase on a podcast recently, the way most of my better rabbit holes begin, you have to work incredibly hard to be as lucky as I am. It sounds like a paradox, and I say it from time to time.
I’ve been running a creative company for twenty-six years, and the honest version of how it started, the version I don’t always lead with, involves a phone call I had no particular right to be taking, in an office that was already on its way out, on an afternoon when I was noodling around trying to keep busy and pondering what came next. Happy Tomorrow had decided to close that month. The phone rang, it was Nike and I happened to be the one who answered as I was the only one niggled enough to come in, which contains more of the truth about how things begin than most origin stories are probably willing to admit.
That conversation sowed the seeds of what eventually became Rosie Lee, and I could very easily have missed it entirely, taking my career in a whole new direction.
The Story That Gets Told
Business culture is committed to the clean narrative, the kind where the founder saw something others missed and built something enduring through the force of their own clarity and conviction, with the luck quietly edited out because that is a more satisfying story and a more fundable one and a much more comfortable thing to put in a keynote. The honest version, the one where timing and circumstance and the willingness to answer a ringing phone in a closing office played a defining role, doesn’t have the same lure, and so it tends not to get told.
To acknowledge luck feels, to many people, like undermining the credibility of what followed, as though admitting that fortune played a role somehow diminishes the effort and commitment that came before and after it, which I understand but which produces a more honest account of how most things actually get off the ground, and a less useful one for anyone trying to understand how the whole thing works.
Surface Area
Luck is not randomly distributed, and this is the part that resolves the paradox rather than simply living in the discomfort of it, I feel it tends to cluster around people who are genuinely present, who are in motion, who have placed themselves through effort, vulnerability, even, and relationships into the proximity of the conversations and scenes that matter, even when they cannot know in advance which one will turn out to be the right one.
I was in Happy Tomorrow’s offices trying to see what could be resurrected from the ashes, reflecting on relationships built across the two years of the studio, and so while the phone call was luck in the purest sense, being positioned to receive it was something else entirely, and understanding the difference between those two things is, I think, one of the more clarifying distinctions you can carry into a career or a company.
This is where the line sits, between the role of fortune and using it as a convenient way to avoid claiming what you have actually built, because the person who attributes everything to effort is telling a story that is too clean, while the person who leans into luck as a comfortable deflection is hiding behind it in a way that, from the outside, looks most likely similar to honesty.
Two Cultures, Two Distortions
I’ve experienced the US version of this regularly, and the dominant narrative there is built around hustle and vision, around the idea that success is something you impose on the world rather than something you find yourself unexpectedly in the middle of, and it produces founders who are often deeply energised by the ‘heroes journey’ story.
The British version carries its own warped distortion in the opposite direction, we are instinctively suspicious of people who claim too much, and sometimes actively judgemental of people who want to do better, more naturally comfortable with the kind of self-deprecation that quietly acknowledges the role of fortune, but the same discomfort that keeps us from over-claiming can also prevent us from fully owning what we have genuinely built, and there is a version of “I was just lucky” that is fair and accurate.
Visibility Is Part of the Work Now
In a previous piece I wrote about using the wrong ruler, about the way we measure things that are easy to count whilst the things that actually matter resist quantification, and I keep returning to that when I think about the most gifted people I have watched stay quiet at exactly the moment that being seen mattered most, not because they lacked the talent or the ideas, but because stepping into visibility was awkwardness and shyness.
‘You don’t get it if you don’t ask’, and in a world shaped by algorithms, platforms and relentless content, staying quiet increasingly means being overlooked, not because you lack value but because you are simply not signalling it to a world that has neither the time nor the inclination to go looking for what is hidden, and so the tension at the heart of this is an uncomfortable one for sure, the most talented people are not always the most visible, and the most visible are not always the most talented, but visibility tends to win regardless, and the people who understand that earliest tend to be the ones who find themselves, as I did in that closing office on an ordinary afternoon, in the right place at the right time when the phone rang.
Stepping out of your comfort zone is no longer optional in the way it once might have been, because it has become a fundamental part of the process of being recognised or visible as someone said to me once, and perhaps the most honest thing I can say about how any of this began is that the luck was real and the work that put me in position to receive it was equally real, and neither alone would have been remotely sufficient.
Fortune tends to find people who have given it somewhere meaningful to land, so the only question worth sitting with is whether you are making yourself findable.