As long as you're persistant and keep iterating, and as long you are perfectly capable of succeeding, then luck will become statistically insignificant with respect to your persistence and as time increases. In other words the longer you keep at it, the less of a factor luck will be.
Luck determines how fast you succeed, or fail, and at which iteration it happens.
If you want to talk about the general trend you can make such a probabilistic claim, like "20% of startups succeed," but it becomes insignificant at the individual level because time spent is variable. You can't give an estimation until you know how much time he/she will keep at it.
I guess Jefferson's way of saying it is the same concept.
The fact that at least two independent sources have come to this conclusion is an indication that it may not be a fabrication of my erratic mind. Thanks for bringing it up.
His first company, now ecnavi.co.jp, owns several internet services such as price comparison, video portal, social bookmarking, game avatar, and encyclopedia. This according to google translation http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&tl....
This seemed very unusual (I live in Japan), so I looked for more info...
Shigeo Ozeki, the CEO at Internet marketing services firm axiv.com, opens a closet in his office. Inside are some untidily folded keys to business success at his firm -- sleeping bags. Ozeki's 19 full-time employees work long hours, many from 10 a.m. to 2 or 3 a.m. seven days a week. "But it depends on where they live and if they have to go home or not," says Ozeki. Often there just isn't time to go home.
But, you know, I think you should have as much fun as you can when you're an undergraduate and play around until you're bored. That way, you'll be a more interesting person when you're a full member of society.
Actually that's exactly what I mean by lazy (not willing to work hard, that is). Obviously there needs to be a balance. Not everything can be done with minimal effort, and not everything is best done with the most effort.
I'm sure you often hear people saying "if you just did it the hard way you would have finished by now" or some variant of that. But doing it the hard way is like hard coding, and the easy way is like doing a function.
It turns out that coding the function might actually take longer the first time, but it saves so much effort later on by being reusable.
The smart person is probably often unintentionally driven by the fear of repeating some difficult time consuming task to implement a more clever solution.
But this smart person is partially helped by the fact that coming up with a reusable or more clever solution is much more mentally stimulating, something they may not have anticipated before starting. And so it turns out that even though doing some clever solution is initially harder, the person ends up not even noticing the increased effort.
The smart person knows how hard copying the dictionary is, but it's often not possible to grasp the difficulty of something novel, like a scheme to copy it faster by using multiple pencils.
So rather than taking the known hard way, the smart person chickens out of fear of working hard and takes the mystery box (a new unknown method), only to find out that the sheer novelty of the mystery box was all that was needed to motivate him/her to work hard.
