A Letter from Chris suarez
THAT WAS NO ACCIDENT
There are no accidents. And yet, too often we like to explain life that way. For better or worse. We use “accident” or “luck” to explain away our wins and push away our losses. We don’t take credit for what we’ve created, and we don’t take ownership of our mistakes.
At times you may look up and find yourself well ahead of where you thought you would be. You are “successful” in the sense that you have accomplished more than you thought you would. Or perhaps you are “successful” in the sense that when someone looks at what you’ve done, they are impressed by the results.
Ask yourself the question, “How did I get here?” If you don’t have a clear answer, if you can’t tell someone exactly the steps you took, if you can’t explain how someone else can repeat what you have done, then you will begin to feel that it was just an accident.
But know this. It was no accident. Nothing that we accomplish is an accident. Don’t believe that where you are today, the business you have built, the success that you have experienced, or the relationships you have are an accident. None of those come from accidents.
Author John Acoff puts it well. No one sits down on the couch to binge watch Netflix, and “accidentally” finds themselves knocking out a night of burpees. You are either watching tv or working out. And either one is fine, as long as it was your choice. You won’t accidentally find yourself working out, or doing any work for that matter. Anything worth anything is not an accident. It took hard work. It took commitment. It took consistency. It took waking up and deciding what it was you wanted to accomplish. Where we went wrong is we didn’t document the steps we took to get where we are. And so we default to calling it an accident or we tell ourselves we got lucky. That's a cop out. It's skirting responsibility. Whether we realize it or not, it took purpose, systems, follow through, and routines.
Perhaps you haven’t built the models out, haven’t sketched through your systems, haven’t internalized the commitments, or haven’t put in the time to really think through what you have done. That doesn’t mean it was an accident. It doesn’t mean you just “put your head down and got lucky.” There is a lot of talk on podcasts and business conversation about the role of “luck” in business success. I don’t believe in luck. I believe in doing the work. I believe in doing the work over long periods of time. I believe in doing the work over long periods of time until it may feel like one day you got “lucky”. But here’s the secret. You didn’t. You just outlasted all the “unlucky”. In other words, over the long term hard work and incremental improvement will always lead to success.
In business, and in life, there are no accidents.
Chris
