I bought an office workstation in July last year and only set it up recently, which is slightly ridiculous but also quite typical of how business purchases sometimes happen. You buy something because it is needed, or will be needed soon, or because a window opens where you can settle the problem before it becomes urgent. Then the business moves on to the next problem, the box sits somewhere, and months later you finally get around to using the thing you already paid for.
There was nothing especially strategic about the purchase. We needed a machine for accounting, Excel, admin work, and the boring operational layer that nobody really talks about but every business quietly depends on. The kind of work where the computer does not need to be exciting, but it cannot be slow, unstable, under-specced, or annoying. It needs to open large spreadsheets without drama. It needs to run accounting software, browser tabs, email, PDFs, WhatsApp Web, maybe some Power Query, maybe a few messy consolidated P&L files from different entities. It is not glamorous work, but it is the work that keeps the numbers visible enough for decisions to be made.
What I had not properly considered before clicking buy is that I had not properly considered anything at all. The old machine had been misbehaving for a while in a specific way — slowdowns, blue screens, the system reporting much less RAM than I knew it had — and we were busy enough with gym buildouts and the usual operational firefighting that I did the thing busy founders default to. I bought a new computer. The old one was already several years old, the new one was needed eventually anyway, and the easy decision was to skip the diagnostic step and replace the whole thing.
It was only after I had clicked buy that I sat down and actually looked at what was happening. The old PC was reporting 8GB of installed memory, which struck me as wrong. I would not have bought a machine with 8GB of RAM even eight years ago, let alone for accounting work. So I checked the original invoice. The machine had shipped with 16GB. Which meant one of the two sticks had likely failed, and the system was running on a single 8GB stick — limping along on half its memory, intermittently dropping in and out of dual channel, occasionally throwing blue screens when something demanded what it thought it had.
The fix was straightforward once I saw it. The motherboard could take four sticks up to a maximum of 32GB, and four 8GB sticks worked out cheaper per gigabyte than two 16GB sticks. So I bought $140 of Transcend RAM, replaced all of the existing memory, and the old PC came back to life. It kept running for another nine months. The new workstation sat in the box. We migrated this week not because the old machine had failed again, but because even with 32GB of working RAM, the processor had finally become the bottleneck. Slow opens, slow saves, slow everything. Time to move.
Recently, after finally setting it up, I went back to check what the same configuration would cost today from the same vendor. Not roughly the same class of machine. Not a cheaper headline build with different compromises hidden inside. As close as possible to the same configuration: same general platform, same RAM, same SSD, same graphics card, same power supply class, same cooler, same Windows and Office inclusion, same three-year warranty structure.
The answer was about 25% more.
I paid around $1,850. The equivalent build today is around $2,470. That is not a rounding error. It is not the kind of difference you explain away with one slightly better part or one small promotion. It is several hundred dollars more for something that is, for practical purposes, the same office workstation.
The mechanism is not especially mysterious. AI datacentre buildouts have put enormous pressure on memory and storage supply. The world suddenly needs a lot more RAM, a lot more SSDs, a lot more high-performance memory, and the supply chain does what supply chains do when a large buyer with urgent demand enters the room. Consumer pricing starts moving. Components that felt ordinary last year become expensive this year. Depending on the exact SKU, RAM and SSD prices have not just gone up slightly; they have moved enough that an old purchase can suddenly look unusually smart.
But that is exactly the problem with the story.
I bought before the curve bent.
I did not know the curve was about to bend.
That is the important part.
This was luck. Not strategy, not foresight, not the proprietary pattern recognition of someone who has been operating businesses for long enough to see around corners. I needed a machine, I bought one, and then the world moved in a way that made my purchase look better than it was. If I had needed that machine nine months later instead of nine months earlier, I would have paid hundreds more and there would be no essay. I would simply have absorbed the higher cost, complained a bit, and moved on.
There is also a smaller layer to this that I find quietly interesting. The new machine sat in the box for nine months not because of strategic patience but because, after I had already clicked buy, I went back and actually diagnosed the old machine. The RAM upgrade kept it alive. If I had not bothered with the second look, or if the upgrade had not worked, I would have migrated to the new workstation in August, and there would be no gap. The price move would still have happened in the world, but it would not have appeared in my story, because my reference point would still have been the price I had just paid. The window for noticing the luck opened only because a careless decision happened to be rescued by a more careful one. Two purchases, made on the same day, one impulsive and one considered, stacked into something that in retrospect looks like timing.
I find this kind of thing interesting because founders, including me, are very bad at telling stories where good luck is allowed to remain good luck. We are quite comfortable telling stories about bad luck. In fact, bad luck often improves the story. The shipment was delayed. The landlord changed the terms. The contractor disappeared. The regulation shifted. The platform changed its algorithm. The customer pulled out. The bank took too long. Bad luck flatters perseverance because the implied ending is that we suffered, adapted, pushed through, and survived.
Bad luck makes us look durable.
Good luck does something less convenient. Good luck makes the outcome feel less fully owned.
So we usually round it into something else. Timing becomes instinct. A favourable market move becomes strategic positioning. Being early without knowing we were early becomes conviction. A supplier relationship that happened to save us becomes our ability to build networks. A customer who appeared at the right time becomes proof of product-market fit. A macro tailwind becomes evidence that we understood the market better than others.
Some of these things may be partly true. That is what makes the self-deception so easy. Most business outcomes are not pure luck or pure skill. They are mixed. You had to be in the game. You had to have cash available. You had to be willing to act. You had to have built enough structure to benefit from the event when it happened. But the fact that you were positioned to receive luck does not mean you created the luck. It only means you were standing in a place where the wind could hit you.
That distinction matters.
Entrepreneurship is usually written with too clean an arc. Saw the problem, made the bet, took the heat, stayed the course, got proven right. It is a satisfying structure because it gives meaning to pain and narrative shape to chaos. It also allows the founder to remain the central causal force in the story. Every setback becomes character development. Every win becomes validation. Every coincidence gets absorbed into the myth of judgment.
But the real texture of business is much messier. Some of it is skill. Some of it is timing. Some of it is accumulated judgment from years of being punched in the face by reality. Some of it is having the right person introduce you at the right moment. Some of it is being in an industry before it becomes obvious. Some of it is having cash available when others do not. Some of it is buying a computer before RAM and SSD prices move sharply because AI datacentres start swallowing supply.
And some of it is simply randomness rewarding people who happened to be positioned to receive it.
This is not false humility. I am not saying work does not matter, or that founders should pretend they did not make difficult decisions. That would be equally dishonest. There is real work. There is real risk. There is real judgment. There are years of small decisions that create the surface area for lucky things to attach themselves to. But the presence of work does not remove the presence of luck. In fact, the more I operate, the more I think the serious work is not to deny luck, but to understand where the work ends and the luck begins.
The danger is not just moral. It is practical.
When you misread luck as skill, you become worse at decision-making. You start copying the wrong parts of your own success. You repeat the visible action without understanding the invisible conditions that allowed the action to work. You tell yourself you made a brilliant call, when what actually happened was that the market saved you, or timing saved you, or a supplier absorbed pain for you, or a competitor made a worse mistake at the exact moment you needed them to.
That kind of misattribution is expensive.
It makes you overconfident in the next bet, but not in the useful way. There is a kind of confidence that helps you move, and there is a kind of confidence that prevents you from seeing what is actually carrying you. The second kind is dangerous because it feels like leadership from the inside. You think you are being decisive. You think you are trusting your instincts. But sometimes what you are really doing is mistaking a previous tailwind for a repeatable internal capability.
That is why I think saying “I was lucky” is not just a humility exercise. It is a diagnostic tool.
It forces you to separate the parts of the outcome you controlled from the parts you did not. In the PC example, I controlled the decision to buy a competent workstation instead of underbuying. I controlled not being penny wise and pound foolish on RAM, storage, power supply, cooling, warranty, and Office. I controlled buying a machine suitable for the work rather than chasing the cheapest headline price. Those were sensible decisions.
But I did not control the AI datacentre cycle. I did not control global memory allocation. I did not control SSD pricing. I did not see the supply curve bending and move early because of some clever thesis. I bought the machine when I needed it, and the market later made that timing look clever.
That is luck.
There is another layer to this which I find harder to express without sounding mystical, so I will say it carefully. I suspect people who see themselves as lucky often become luckier over time, but not because the universe rewards positive thinking. I do not believe luck works that way. I think it is more behavioural than that.
People who think they are lucky tend to take more small risks. They show up to more rooms. They are more willing to have conversations with no immediate return. They are less quick to dismiss strange openings. They scan the world as if something useful might be hiding inside ordinary events, and because of that, they sometimes notice what others do not. They are also easier to be around because they are not constantly carrying grievance into the room. That part is underrated. People help people they do not mind helping. They share information with people who receive it well. They make introductions to people who will not embarrass them. They bring opportunities to people who seem alive to possibility rather than permanently convinced that the world has shortchanged them.
Over time, that compounds.
The inverse is also true. People who see themselves as unlucky often become harder for luck to reach. They take fewer small risks. They attend fewer conversations. They reject more opportunities before they have properly understood them. They become suspicious when help arrives and resentful when it does not. Eventually, the world gives them something close to what they expected, because their behaviour shaped what the world had a chance to deliver.
This is why gratitude for luck has a practical case even outside any spiritual framing. Gratitude keeps you accurate about how much of your outcome was given rather than earned. It prevents you from becoming the kind of founder who believes every win was deserved, every break was engineered, every favourable move in the market was just evidence of superior judgment. That kind of founder becomes hard to help, and often does not realise it until the invitations stop coming.
The grateful founder is different. Not softer. Not less ambitious. Not pretending the work was easy. Just more accurate. He can say, without embarrassment, that the timing was lucky, the conditions were lucky, the people around him were lucky, the market moved in a way that helped him, and he happened to be positioned to receive something he did not create.
That does not erase the work.
It puts the work in its proper place.
I do not know how to honestly tell the PC story without saying I was lucky. I bought a machine I needed, on a normal week, from a normal vendor, for normal business reasons. Months later, the world rearranged itself in a way that made the purchase look smarter than it was. The right response is not to pretend I saw it coming. The right response is to notice the luck, be grateful for it, and stay the kind of operator who remains available for the next round of luck without depending on it.
That last part matters. You cannot build a business by depending on luck. But you also cannot understand business properly if you remove luck from the story after it has helped you. The work is to keep building, keep deciding, keep positioning, keep reducing the downside where you can, and then, when the wind happens to be at your back, resist the very human temptation to rewrite the story as if you built the wind.
Sometimes you were smart.
Sometimes you were early.
Sometimes you worked harder than others.
And sometimes you were just lucky.
It is useful to know which is which.
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