Lucky or Smart
We had our second 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards event in New York City on Monday evening, and it went swimmingly. (If you'd like to read about the winners, you can find them here.) Being an incurable introvert, though, I am not the most comfortable person at these events. Try to mingle and make small talk as I might, I usually end up spinning in silent circles between various groups of chattering people, trying not to look too awkward. I usually end up somewhere near the bar, looking out over the crowd and wondering how I ever made it into the company of such lovely, smart and talented people. And there is an answer, or at least a story...
"I was smart enough to realize I was getting lucky."
Lucky or Smart Page x11
I began working at 800-CEO-READ on January 27, 2003, taking over the shipping/receiving job from my brother Ryan (the OG iBG) when he was promoted into Customer Service and Sales. I took the job because, a month earlier, I had quit a job I liked at a natural foods store (The Outpost) to move to a town I wasn't overly fond of (Madison) to be closer to a woman I was deeply in love with (it wasn't working) and I needed a change. The job was part-time and didn't pay what I knew I could make elsewhere, but it had something those other places didn't have—books.
The book we have for you today is Lucky or Smart: Secret to an Entrepreneurial Life by Bo Peabody. The introduction to the book is a bullet pointed time line of Peabody's career from ages eighteen to twenty-eight. It started with an internet start-up in college named Tripod. A few of the highlights include:
- Using what little cash I could raise from friends and family, I hired a team of computer programmers ...
- Unbeknownst to me, and surely with some sort of anarchic motive, these lawless, long-haired, multi-pierced, tattooed, incredibly smart and charming and smart hacker hooligans built a piece of software in Tripod that ... gave individuals the power to publish their own "personal homepages."
- By the middle of 1997, Tripod had attracted nearly one million registered members.
- On December 30, 1997, in the middle of a stock-market bubble, I was offered $58 million for Tripod.
- On December 31, 1997, I agreed to sell Tripod for $58 million in stock of a publicly traded company named Lycos ...
- ... I watched the value of my Lycos stock increase tenfold.
- By December 31, 1999, at the heaight of the bubble and just a few months before the market crashed, I had sold nearly every share of my Lycos stock.
Peabody went on to found many other companies (some of which worked and some which didn't) and, in the process, learn a thing or twelve about business. It is in the twelve chapters of Lucky or Smart, an easy-to-read 58 pages, that Peabody has recorded these lessons for others.
I came to 800-CEO-READ armed with a love a literature, in the hope of getting enough free books that the lower pay might be balanced by saving money on books. Just as I had worked at the natural foods store for the discount on quality physical sustenance, I came to 8cr for the discount on quality mental sustenance. Being a part of a local bookstore, I knew I'd get a chance to grab some great contemporary fiction and history.
What I didn't expect is that, eventually, I would come to appreciate the business books I was shipping out the door so much. I also didn't expect to follow my older brother Ryan and move into Customer Service, or for him to leave for New Orleans, opening a spot for my oldest brother, Aaron, to come back from Los Angeles and take his place. I didn't expect Ryan to come back and start inBubbleWrap, or to leave for WMSE, giving me the opportunity to write this to you now. (I have, due to this crazy history, kind of expected our other brother, Nathan, to end up in the folds of 8cr somehow, but seeing as he's busy running the HI-Hat/Garage, I don't see that happening now.)
It's been 7 years since I came to 800-CEO-READ as the shipper/receiver, and I'm now the Managing Editor of ChangeThis.com, Curator of this site, and the company's resident illustrator. Standing rather awkwardly in the corner of the Shoreham Hotel's event space on Monday, gazing out over a room filled with the smartest people in the business, that suddenly hit me. I haven't made millions like Bo Peabody did, but like him, I would say:
Was I lucky? You bet your ass I was lucky. But I was also smart: smart enough to realize I was getting lucky.
Wait... what?
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