Strategy: Luck Can Be Designed Too
“That’s a one-in-a-million chance it will happen” is something we say whenever something extraordinary takes place. An Olympic record, a baseball that hits and kills a bird mid-flight during a Major League game, or a garage business suddenly taking off and becoming the next billion-dollar company.
There are countless moments where pure luck plays a decisive role, like winning the lottery or being born in a particular place. But in other parts of your career or business, luck can be influenced—or even hacked—in your favor. Sometimes it can even be nurtured, nudged just a little. How? By having a strategy.
We’ve all met people who we’re convinced got to where they are by pure luck… and you might be right. The same goes for companies. I’m sure more than once you’ve wondered, “How on earth did this company reach the market and stay open for so many years?” Luck might have something to do with it. And when we see examples like that, it’s perfectly natural to assume that, sooner or later, luck will smile on us too and drop an opportunity in our lap.
When Hope Dresses Up as Strategy
This belief is precisely what leads many individuals and business leaders to downplay the importance of building a solid strategy. Before diving into how all of this applies to AI strategy in the next article, I thought it would be useful to unpack why strategy matters and what role luck actually plays in a successful career or business.
This becomes even clearer when we talk about investing in AI or hiring AI vendors: lots of action, zero strategy. The result? Uneven outcomes—if you're lucky. But as you’ll see in the following lines, while luck certainly exists, it’s not something you should rely on, especially if you have big goals for your future or your organization’s.
So why does strategy exist? Why do we need it? And why do those without it stumble so often? Strategy exists because life runs within constraints: limited time, limited money, limited people, and the delightful reality that your competitors want the same things you do. We need strategy because it aligns our long-term goals with the resources we actually have, giving coherence to decisions that would otherwise be random reactions. And those who lack it? They burn through resources, chase distractions, and put their faith in hope disguised as a plan.
In short: strategy is the discipline of turning intent into sustained progress.
Lucky Breaks or Sustained Progress?
And what about luck? Does it put on a mask and sprint through your city dropping lucky breaks at random while dodging everyone else? Not exactly. Luck lives inside probabilities. Every day, about 8,240 people hit their one-in-a-million moment, and around eight hit the one-in-a-billion. Add that up over a year and millions of people experience wild, improbable situations—some good, some not so good. And the other 8.232 billion? They didn’t get a hit… of luck that day. Which is why so many people turn to strategy as their preferred way of generating it.
Of course, you could bet your future on luck. It shows up often enough to keep hope alive, and sometimes it even sticks around for a while before evaporating. But it’s a risky bet. You can design a strategy that tilts probabilities in your favor… or wait for masked luck to sprint your way and land a hit as it passes.
This is why I wanted to pause and lay out why strategy matters, before moving on to what it actually entails and what an AI strategy looks like in practice. Luck comes and goes. Strategy, on the other hand, gives you a way to shape outcomes instead of chasing them. In the next article, we’ll explore how this applies to AI and how you can make deliberate decisions that tilt the odds in your favor. Until then, you can start shaping your strategy… or stand still hoping masked luck runs past you and, this time, doesn’t skip over you.
Originally published in Spanish for Fast Company Mexico:
https://fastcompany.mx/2025/10/01/estrategia-suerte-tambien-planea/
