I used to think about entrepreneurship as throwing darts and hoping one of them would hit.
Learning more about AI and how systems work has made me want to examine that process. When I say something came down to luck, what am I leaving unexplained? Was there preparation involved? Was there a way of encountering the opportunity that I could understand better?
I keep coming back to the relationship between preparation and opportunity.
Preparation for what?
Working hard doesn’t tell me whether I’m preparing for something I will actually encounter. Direction matters. I can spend a lot of time learning within one domain and still miss possibilities outside it.
That’s why I’m interested in expanding my surface area. If I learn enough about another field to understand some of its problems, I have more places to look. If I keep exposing my work to the world, I have more chances to find out where it connects.
I want to understand how those choices affect the opportunities I can recognize and act on.
How far can I take the equation?
It’s tempting to write this as a function: preparation and opportunity go in, luck comes out. I like the question it makes me ask about the inputs.
But naming a function doesn’t mean I can compute it. I haven’t defined the variables well enough, and I can’t claim control over everything that affects an outcome. More exposure doesn’t guarantee that the right opportunity will appear.
What I can do is get more deliberate about what I learn and where I look. I can build systems that help me act when I find something worth pursuing.
That is the shift I’m interested in for this next phase. I want to understand more of what I’m doing than I did when I was throwing darts. I still have to find out how much of the process I can make repeatable.