Like many entrepreneurs, I have always been a big believer in hard work. If you put in the work, you will see the results, and there is pretty much nothing else to it. Only as I have matured, I slowly began to understand that there is more to it. When you hear people say that to succeed in business you need luck, what they mean is that you need the right things to come together at the right time. You need the knowledge, experience and the timing to all come together for dreams to come alive.

Hard workers can blind themselves to the other factors that can play a huge role in whether you rise to the top of a company, the new business you start succeeds, or that partnership that you are working on ends up coming through. Hard work is an essential ingredient for sure but hard work without these three things can be a lost cause.

Why The Grind is Not Enough – 3 Things You Need For Success

1. Knowledge

How much do you know? When you read books, how much do you retain? You need to know a lot about a subject to be successful. If you want to rise to the top, you are going to have to prove that you know what the hell you are talking about.

Knowledge can come from:

School

Mentors

Online courses

Seminars

Books

It does not matter where the knowledge comes from, but you just know that you need to have it. Knowledge is what is going to give you the edge. To be able to have information that others just don’t have can give you a huge competitive advantage.

2. Experience

Experience is where knowledge becomes useful. Everyone knows someone who has read every book in the world, yet they apply none of what they learn.

Mike Tyson was quoted saying “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The statement is so important when it comes to experience. You can read a book and watch movies on how to fight, but until you get punched and have to keep going, the knowledge will not sink in. If you are told to keep your hands up and in a fight you drop them, the pain will become your teacher.

You need to the right experiences in the right places to be a success. Life is full of journeys, destinations, jobs, and people who leave an impact on us in both negative and positive ways. These experiences add up, and they become the cement of our make up. We can’t change the past, but we can learn from it.

Here’s To The Entrepreneurs – Motivational Speech by Fearless Motivation – WATCH FREE:

3. Timing

Out of the three, timing is the most difficult to get correct because it is often out of our hands most of the time.

Timing requires things like:

Being in the right place at the right time.

Meeting the right person at the right time

Knowing the right combination of people

Entering a market at the right time

There is not a lot you can do to get timing right other than paying attention. Facebook started at the perfect time because MySpace had proven that people love social networks, but it was not a great product. Mark Zuckerberg went to a prestigious school and met his Co-Founder who had the cash to put $15,000+ into the business. Not many people have college buddies that can do that. The timing was impeccable and not something Mark was not able to control.

Pay attention. When economic tides are shifting that is a warning sign to take action. When the right people just keep coming into your life, or you keep getting warnings to move somewhere you need to be willing to get up and go.

How It All Comes Together

FIXT APP was an idea I have had since I was 19 and I just sat on it because that was the first time that I started realizing what I am talking about in this article. The situation had to be just right. I knew I was not smart enough, experienced enough and the world was not ready for it.

After graduating from college and moving to Oklahoma to continue training for track and field, the pieces started to come together. I met a young man who asked me to be his marketing mentor, and he has nor surpassed me, it only made sense to bring him on because he was a former student-athlete. He moved out to Phoenix, AZ where I moved next just because I asked him to so I knew he was all in.

I started working for a professional track and field company, and this brought in plenty of connections to top athletes, coaches, and therapists all around the world. I just kept meeting them on a daily basis, and this was when I started to realize that the timing was right.

My friend that I would talk to a lot about my idea, tragically passed away and it sent a shock through my world. I never actually had to think about how short life can be so I knew it was action time. When I thought about what he always told me to do, there was really no other choice.

Between the time of the idea to when I actually started FIXT, I had started four different businesses, read countless books and been mentored by numerous entrepreneurs. I joined Peter Voogd’s game changer network, and I just keep learning.

I got a sales job at a sports company that sold to my target market, and it just made more sense of what I was doing and what I needed to be doing. All of these things were not happening by chance. They were happening because the timing was right. The stars were all aligning.

I met the perfect programmer to be a co-founder. He used to be an athlete (which is rare for developers), and his mom is a Physical Therapists, which is our target market. He talked with her about the idea and she loved it and he was all in from that day forward.

I was grinding but the timing was also right. The right pieces just kept falling into place, and I was finally able to understand the power of waiting for the right time. Not everything in life needs to be rushed. The health care industry is in a place where it is finally ready to be disrupted by technology.

Lastly, the health care market was finally starting to welcome health tech with open arms. Health care almost always lags behind when it comes to tech. When I began to see a lot of health tech companies getting love in the press and society starting to understand that health care is way behind, it was just another sign that the timing was right.