6 years after starting my company...
Something must have magically happened today. After starting Haalthy 6 years ago, I have not been keeping up with my blog. But today while I was trying to search my Gmail for my BTC, @Squarespace’s reminder email stole my attention:
Your website is going to expire in 15 days. Time to renew it.
So I got back to my own website…
Since being a CEO of my company, I have tried to avoid being too emotional. However, I bursted into tears after reading my post “The Alabama Guy”. He’s the first human who believed I would be on the Forbes magazine. And I did, in 2017, along with other achievements, one of which that I am most proud of - we have used digital therapy to save over 300 millions RMB for patients and helped them reduce severe side effects by 30%. I could not believe how many “dreams“ have come true & how little I had changed in the past 7 years. Since our company broke even in 2020, I started to wonder myself:
Why, as a first-time founder, we have avoided the 99% failure rate and still survive today (and doing better & better).
Reading through my own writings from 7 years ago, I finally got an answer that explained the fundamental -
Being lucky
Don’t get me wrong. There are so many other contributes that play crucial roles in making a startup successful, which I will write about them as soon as I have free time from now on.
But “luck” is more important that I think. I used to believe as long as someone works hard, they will get whatever they want. I was wrong.
Using me as an example, if my dad did not pass away in 2015, I would not make the decision to go back to China in the same year, which I would missed “the hottest“ era to fund raise for digital health, which I would have not received my angel money.
This is pure “luck”. What I would like to emphasize here, is the luck that we can create. This kind of luck is very subtle but I finally understand how the dots are connected in retrospect.
Here is my version: how to be lucky -
Meeting “the Alabama guy”, Shane, he said and did “everything to make my shitty day better”. Well he is a random co-worker I met during a random field job at NYC. But here comes the first key to be lucky:
Be open, be less-judgemental, be sharing.
He was 44 and I was 25. What a huge age gap. If we held ourselves in our own comfort zone, we would have never talked to each other; He is from Alabama & I am from China. If we keep our bias towards each other’s origin, we would have never be able to continue our conversation; if he was not sharing his knowledge and I was not sharing my dreams, we would have not related our deep thoughts with each other and hence deep emotions.
The story did not end here. What described above are just the phenotypes that we saw as it happened. What struck me was the after effect.
I had a very bad period in my life at that time, but I met Shane, who gave me support and more importantly, optimism. So it wired me to think well when I had bad time, someone would give me support and optimism. This habit lasted for a long time even made a great impact on my startup:
Every time when our startup encountered difficulties, I did not avoid problems but instead asked for help. Every time, without exception, I believed someone was going to help me. Guess what?
Every time, someone helped me.
Shane gave me support & optimism, which I turned them into my subconsciousness, which turned into my belief - there will be someone who will be willing to help me. All I did, is to follow “be open, be less-judgemental, be sharing” every time I met someone new or old. Sometimes it is them who need my help, I would provide the same support & optimism that Shane shared with me; but most time (as far as I remembered) it is me who need help and I can turn to so many people for help. This, is the luck that I create.
There are really two things that are crucial to create luck:
let the good things (in my case: support & optimism) from any person & situations to seep into our subconsciousness;
be open, be less-judgement, be sharing.
Meeting Shane is my pure “luck”. But meeting so many people like Shane in my past tense is the luck I train myself to create.
To Shane: Thank you for believing in me.