In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, he argues that the key to success lies in spending at least 10,000 hours working at your field. Another author, Francis Johansson, disagrees. Mr. Johansson argues that many times success is far more attributable to luck and serendipity than we are willing to admit.
In his book titled "The Click Moment", he says we need to turn our attention to those moments when skill and luck combine.
He argues that practice can make perfect for a sport or a skill (like a musical instrument) because the rules don't change. Hours spent at practice pay off in building specific muscle memory that can create brilliant performance (especially at critical moments). In the world of business, there are many more dynamics at play that are unpredictable. What worked last year may not work next year. In those cases, there needs to be new combinations and lots of attempts. Here is a sample of his thinking from the article:
Can you give an example of a "click moment"?
Youtube started as a dating site [a video version of Hot or Not]. It was awful as a dating site. People had to upload their videos and have people vote on them. Who wants to do that? Then two of the founders [Chad Hurley and Steve Chen] go out to dinner -- they filmed the dinner but had nowhere to upload it. Then the third founder founder [Jawed Karim] tries to find a video of a Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and can't find it, and so when they meet up they think "wait a minute, you want to upload a video, I want to find a video, our platform can do that. Eighteen months later they sold it for $1.65bn to Google.
Can't serendipity lead just as easily lead to disastrous outcomes as it does good ones?
People say luck is blind. And so, in some ways, yes. What I'm arguing for will lead to more "disasters". But you need to play purposeful bets and take statistical advantage of randomness. Think about Angry Birds. Rovio made that game and people said "whoa, it's an overnight success". Well no. Actually they'd been around for eight years and it was their 52nd game. No one has heard of the other 51 but if you or anyone else tried something 52 times, you would have a pretty good shot at doing something remarkable.
Here is a link to the full article: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/15/the-click-moment
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