Entre­pre­neu­rial hope is essen­tial. It gets us over the hump and through the dip. There’s a variety of this hope, though, that’s far more dama­ging than helpful.

This is the hope of the magic lot­tery ticket.

A fled­gling entre­pre­neur ambu­shes a ven­ture capi­ta­list who just appea­red on a panel. “Excuse me,” she says, then laun­ches into a two, then six and even­tually twenty minute pitch that will never (sorry, never) lead to the VC say­ing, “Great, here’s a check for mil­lion on your terms.”

Or the fled­gling author, the one who has been tur­ned down by ten agents and then copies his manu­script and fede­xes it to twenty large publi­shing houses–what is he hoping for, exac­tly? Perhaps he’s hoping to win the magic lot­tery, to be the one piece of slush cho­sen out of a mil­lion (lite­rally a mil­lion!) that goes on to be publi­shed and revered.

You deserve bet­ter than the dashed hopes of a magic lottery.

There’s a hard work alter­na­tive to the magic lot­tery, one in which you can incre­men­tally lay the ground­work and inte­grate into the system you say you want to work with. And yet instead of doing that work, our instinct is to demo­nize the per­son that wants to take away our tic­ket, to con­fuse the math of the situa­tion (there are very few glass slip­pers avai­la­ble) with someone try­ing to slam the door in your faith/face.

You can either work your­self to point where you don’t need the tran­som, or you can play a dif­fe­rent game alto­ge­ther, but thro­wing your stuff over the tran­som isn’t wor­thy of the work you’ve done so far.

Star­bucks didn’t become Star­bucks by get­ting disco­ve­red by Oprah Win­frey or being bles­sed by War­ren Buf­fet when they only had a few sto­res. No, they plug­ged along. They rai­sed bits of money here and there, flir­ted with disa­ster, added one store and then ano­ther, twea­ked and mea­su­red and impro­ved and repea­ted. Day by day, they drip­ped their way to suc­cess. No magic lottery.

What chance is there that Mark Cuban or Car­los Slim is going to agree to be your men­tor, to open all doors and give you a short­cut to the top? Bet­ter, I think, to avoid wasting a moment of your time hoping for a fairy god­mo­ther. You’re in a hurry and this is a dead end.

When someone encou­ra­ges you to avoid the magic lot­tery, they’re not cri­ti­ci­zing your idea nor are they try­ing to shat­ter your faith or take away your hope. Instead, they’re poin­ting out that short­cuts are rarely depen­da­ble (or par­ti­cu­larly short) and that instead, perhaps, you should fol­low the lon­ger, more deli­be­rate, less magi­cal path if you truly want to succeed.

If your busi­ness or your music or your art or your pro­ject is truly worth your energy and your pas­sion, then don’t sell it short by put­ting its future into a lot­tery ticket.

Here’s ano­ther way to think about it: delight the audience you already have, amaze the custo­mers you can already reach, dazzle the small inve­stors who already trust you enough to listen to you. Take the per­mis­sion you have and work your way up. Leaps look good in the movies, but in fact, suc­cess is mostly about fin­ding a path and wal­king it one step at a time.

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