Of Luck And Success

Alexis Madrigal relates a story about a couple of tech icons:

But let's look at an interesting complement to this plane story from the end of Noyce's life, the day Noyce took Steve Jobs out for a ride one day in 1979.
Noyce's wife, Ann Bowers, had taken to working with Apple. Jobs, for his part, had sought out Noyce as a mentor. He called their house late at night, dropped in at odd times, and generally made himself a scruffy presence in their lives. They took a liking to young Steve and so Noyce took Jobs flying in his Seabee, a World War II-era plane, which could land on land or water. Here's what happened:

After landing on a lake, Noyce pulled a wrong lever, inadvertently locking the wheels. It was not until he tried to land the plane on a runway that he realized there was a problem. Immediately upon hitting the ground, the Seabee leapt forward and nearly flipped. Jobs watched with mounting panic as Noyce furiously tried to bring the plane under control while sparks shot past the windows. "As this was happening," Jobs recalls, "I was picturing the headline: 'Bob Noyce and Steve Jobs Killed in Fiery Plane Crash.'

I thought about that moment while watching the American Experience film about Silicon Valley. What makes a good story are the characters, and so we focus on a Noyce or a Jobs. But the deeper you look at a given time and place, particularly the milieu associated with a series of technologies as powerful as the transistor, integrated circuit, microprocessor, and personal computer, the more the contingencies and luck crop up. Both were undeniably great entrepreneurs but there were so many near misses and near deaths and wrong turns. You can't help but ask, what if? Jobs' success was not accidental; but his death would have been.

Madrigal follows up with several other lucky breaks Noyce caught along the way during his life.  Luck is everywhere.  Some is good, some is bad.  Quite a number of successful people just have had a long run of good luck.  Some people struggling to survive just have had a long run of bad luck.  Most of us are somewhere in between.  I remember plenty of good luck and just a little bad luck.  I wish more successful people would remember some of their luck, good and bad.