“There’s no such thing as luck, just preparation meeting opportunity…”
– Steve Napolitan

I got this from Donald Trump of all people. I saw him speak, and while you’re probably thinking about all the crazy things on the news, I’m glad I heard him say something useful. He said that luck is a meeting between preparation and opportunity.

And here’s how he did it. One time, he was struggling in one of his businesses. The business was about to go bankrupt—the bank was not working with him, he was having a horrible day, he went home and his butler said, “Hi sir, your tuxedo is in your room, you’ve got to get ready.”

Of course, he is thinking, “I don’t want to go out.” After all, he just had a horrible day. But he decides to put the tux on and go to the party.

At the party, he’s sitting at the table and starts talking to a stranger, a gentleman. They end up having a great conversation! And guess what? This gentleman Donald was speaking to, was the owner of the bank that he’s struggling with on the business loan.

Through that conversation, he was able to renegotiate terms with the bank and save the company! Just by being at one place that he really didn’t want to go to that night

Sometimes in life, it is just about showing up!

For me, I’ll tell you just a quick story. In my early years when I first started my company, I was looking for opportunities, and one of my friends was able to secure me a meeting with a marketing director from a Fortune 100 company. Of course, this wasn’t by luck. I was committing to making sales calls and introductions daily.

So, I ended up getting a conversation with this marketing director. I go to the meeting thinking it is a one on one conversation, but it’s the whole marketing department! There are about 20 people around the boardroom table!

At the tie, I was not into public speaking. I didn’t have a pre-planned presentation or handouts. And there I am, sitting there at the conversation, and I completely blew the meeting. I walked out of that meeting thinking I completely failed, “There’s no way that I’m going to get the opportunity to work with that company.”

After the meeting, I still sent them the proposal because they asked me to. I waited. On the second day after sending the proposal, they called me and said, “Hey Steve, we’d like to proceed with you.

I was thinking, “Why??”

I didn’t want to refuse such lucrative business, so I went with it. Later, as we were producing videos for them, the marketing director came up to me and said, “Steve, can I talk to you for a second?”

I said, “Yes.” I thought I was going to get fired.

He responded:

“Steve, you’re doing a great job. In fact, it’s better than we thought. In fact, I’ll go even further. The reason we hired you is that you were so cheap that we could hire you if you failed, then we still had the budget to hire a real company.”

He continued:

“The reason that I’m telling you this right now is that you did so good. We’re so happy with the choice that we made. We think you even did better than the other companies we were looking at.”

I ended up getting a two-year contract with them, producing a lot of in-house communications for them, and I ended up saving them a million dollars in training!

Okay, enough about me. The point is, I focused on doing the best job I could with the opportunity I got. And, I just showed up and made those calls. I was open to opportunity.

Whatever you do, however you feel, one of the best things that you could do is just show up. Just get out there, meet people, and share YOU. So, here is just ONE thing you can do:

1. Find one networking event a week, and just show up. You never know who you are going to bump into.

That’s how the ones that you think are lucky, the ones that have spent 10 years meeting a ton of people, end up securing those big opportunities.

That’s it for now. Wishing you the best, and I can’t wait to read and respond to every success story you will have to share! 😊

Choose Gratitude Create Freedom

Steve Napolitan