What It Takes To Make An Impact

Locality, Opportunity, and Time.

A picture from a Rocky Balboa posing a sign of victory from the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, also known as The Rocky Steps.

As a programmer, I've read and learned a lot about tech and entrepreneurship in the past decade. I'm fascinated about how some entrepreneurs can create profitable tech companies while others with a similar technical background can't.

Life is about making an impact, not making an income.

— Kevin E. Kruse

As a Growth Mindset practitioner, I don't believe we're born with talent or "born to be successful". Maybe we're born with a genetic predisposition for certain behaviours, but creating a successful company or generating impact is not a fundamental characteristic from since we're born. It's instead a result of the choices we make and the decisions of the people around us.

There is good and bad news.

The good news is that some of those conditions can increase your chances. The bad news is that some of those conditions may not be under your control.

This post is going to talk about something I call LOT: L ocality, O pportunity, and T ime.

Locality

Locality means you're born in the right place, or you've moved to a better place later in life.

Warren Buffett uses the analogy of the Ovarian lottery: if you're born American, you're more likely to get better opportunities and care less about basic needs. Likewise, if you're born in Silicon Valley, then it's more likely your tech projects will get more funding than if you're born in an island in the middle of the pacific.

Opportunity

Opportunity means that you embrace opportunities regardless of the risk.

Say you face with three career options:

• stay in your current job where you're stable
• accept the offer in a company that can give you a competitive salary above the market
• accept the offer in a company that can give you a competitive learning opportunity in a domain you lack experience.

In the mindset of embracing opportunities, you can say that any option better than the one you are right now is a better one. However, if you accept the offer with the company that can pay a salary above the market, you may realize that after joining, they also had higher expectations. Therefore, the opportunity turned out to be a dead end as you weren't yet ready for that level of expectation.

Time

Time is something that you have to use. You have to leverage time to persist through the obstacles without a rush.

To optimize your time, though, you have to consider every failure as a learning opportunity. You need the experience to make sure you minimize the risks when embracing new opportunities.

But it ain't about how hard you hit; it is about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much can you take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!

— Rocky Balboa

For example, in the last opportunity, you accepted the offer in the company that can pay more which turned out to be a dead end. You learned from that experience. In the next one, instead of taking the offer with the company that will give you a competitive salary, you can take the offer with a company that can provide you with significant learning opportunity in a domain you lack experience. That can end up giving you more intrinsic value than what you would get in a company with higher expectations.

Of course, you can only afford to reject an opportunity for more money if your economic circumstances allow you to make that decision. Depending on your Locality , you may not have a choice.

Time is necessary to achieve any goal. It's a non-renewable resource, and you don't have much of that left in your life.

Locality, Opportunity, and Time

Work towards living in the right place , embracing opportunities , and using your time to get relevant experience. If you do that, you're more likely to succeed. Eventually.

However, there are things you might not be able to change right now.

• You can't change your location due to the politics of your country;
• You may not have enough opportunities because of your skin color or gender identity;
• You may not have enough time to try different things because of your current economic circumstances.

Likewise, you can still ignore LOT and create a massive impact in the world, only your chances of doing that are significantly lower.

To create an impact isn't about "talent" or "intelligence", but rather about factors which are within your control or the control of the people around you. You have to insert yourself in an environment that gives you promising conditions and fight for the change you want; that's a surefire way to set yourself up to success.

If you're serious about this, it's better to start doing something.

Could you do it now; and do it a LOT?

Thanks for reading. If you have some feedback, reach out to me on Twitter, Facebook or Github.

Wanna chat in person? You can find me in the Sydney Software Crafters meetup.