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Close to the pin
A twenty-year-old working at an investment bank got a question from an associate of about twenty-five who seemed like an elder at the time: do you golf? The answer was no. The associate's point was that with golf you keep practicing and keep getting the ball close to the pin, close to the pin, close to the pin. That is hard work, and it is working smart. Getting the hole in one is luck.
Luck and timing
Luck is real, and there is a way to increase it: get a lot of balls close to the pin, and eventually one will drop. Timing shows how much sits outside any company's control. Cerebras went public in May, after an attempt in 2024 that would have come at a much lower valuation and did not work out. Eighteen months made all the difference.
One investor's model
The same model shapes how one venture investor picks companies. He has invested in 18 companies over 12 years, one or two a year, with very high conviction and very high commitment. Keep working with very special people on opportunities with no ceiling, and magic can happen.
How rare is a hole in one?
The National Hole-In-One Registry estimates the odds at about 12,500 to 1 for an average golfer on a par 3. For professional golfers the same registry puts the odds near 2,500 to 1. The better player's edge comes from landing the ball closer to the pin on every shot. A hole in one is the rare point where that skill and chance line up.
Does luck really respond to behavior?
The psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire studied hundreds of people who called themselves lucky or unlucky and described the work in his 2003 book The Luck Factor. In one experiment, participants counted photographs in a newspaper. A large ad on the second page told them they had already won, and unlucky participants tended to miss it. Lucky participants noticed it more often.
Why does chance favor preparation?
Louis Pasteur said in an 1854 lecture at the University of Lille that in the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind. He was speaking about scientific discovery, where the same accident can pass unseen by one researcher and open a new field for another. Alexander Fleming's observation of mold killing bacteria on a culture plate in 1928 is a well-known example. The mold had drifted into the dish by accident.
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