It's amazing how things connect to each other.  You never know from which corner your next idea or opportunity will come from.  I read The Black Swann by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  He is not the most engaging writer I have ever read (he is really difficult to understand) but the thing that stands out is the quality of his thinking.  For good or bad, his ideas have influenced my thinking dramatically.  One of the main premises of his writing is that many times success in a certain endeavor is based on luck as much as anything else.

If you accept that premise, then one of the most interesting takeaways from his book is that it pays to be lucky.  Like my wise father always says 'It's better to be lucky than good."  Nassim Taleb points out in the book that the best way to maximize your chances of being lucky is by exposing yourself to as many business ideas as you can.  The more exposure you have, the higher chance you have of being in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills (in other words, being lucky).  Entrepreneurs have a greater possibility of being lucky than, say, a dentist. 

If you take a hundred different dentists and follow them throughout their lives, maybe 80 or 90 of them might end up financially pretty well off by the end of their lives.  The  10 or 20 who are not financially pretty well off at the end of their lives are that way for  a variety of reasons.  Some of them will have died or become disabled.  Others will have made poor investment choices, or have been subjected to ruinous lawsuits.  Most of them will probably do pretty well, but almost none of them will be fantastically wealthy. 

On the other hand, if you take a hundred different entrepreneurs and follow them throughout their lives.  Many will fail, and many will fail lots of times.  A few will get lucky right off and get rich right away (ala Sergey Brin and Larry Page).  Many will never get it right and everybody will have thought of them as failures by the end of their lives.  Of the hundred entrepreneurs, the majority will probably never achieve a great success.  However, one or two may achieve fantastic, almost unbelievable wealth.  If you look at the distributions of the 100 entrepreneurs at the end of their lives, one or two will have achieved phenomenal success, a few others will be fairly well set but the majority will probably either have just made a living, or will have left entreprenuership altogether.

Nassim Taleb's point is that probably none of the 100 dentist will be fantastically wealthy, but at least one or two of the entrepreneurs will.  So, he suggests to put yourself in as many situations as possible to maximize the probability that you will be exposed to that one idea or opportunity that can make you lucky!