10 Accidental Discoveries That Generated Great Wealth

Everyone who’s been successful knows that more often than not the success comes down to a combination of hard work and luck. Ideas and skill are important too. But ultimately it’s the people who increase their chances of success through perseverance and hard work who are successful. Of course there are some people who owe their success more to luck than anything else (and we’ll look at ten of those people later in this article). The fact is we’re always going to have to let some of the puzzle pieces fall into place. We can’t micromanage the world. We can’t perfectly execute every detail down to the sub-atomic level of reality. What we can do as business people, is to create the best possible set of circumstances to achieve our goals, and then to let luck work itself out from there.

When I started out my online business I didn’t know what I was doing. I had some technical skills and I had a dream: to work for myself. I took a lot of stabs in the dark. The learning curve was steep. And I failed a whole lot. But I persevered and learned what works and what doesn’t work. The perseverance allowed me to learn how to improve my chances of “getting lucky.” And eventually I got “lucky” with a few small successes. And then duplicated the “luck” a few times and got even more lucky. It turns out that in business, “luck” can be controlled.

Because of the huge respect I have for the “luck” aspect of success, I decided it would be fun for BusinessPundit to put together a list of accidental discoveries that made people rich. And here’s that article:

Sometimes the most lucrative business discoveries come about by sheer chance. Here we bring together ten resourceful men whose incidental discoveries are a template for budding entrepreneurs looking to make a quick buck. While these finds may have come about by accident, it is no coincidence that they went on to generate huge profits. Each discovery exemplifies how with ingenuity, prudent investment in R&D and a bit of good fortune, companies and individuals can make billions. Most of these discoveries found many applications, which, with some skillful marketing, were able to take the world by storm. They offer valuable lessons in business that can help anyone to start a company.

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