The first thing they teach you in a microbiology lab is patience.
I was a student then, years before anyone would call me an innovation strategist. My world was a bench, a flame, and glass dishes with life growing inside them. You did not rush. You labelled everything. You wrote down every step, even the ones you were sure did not matter. And you learned the rule that has followed me ever since.
If you cannot repeat a result, it did not really happen.
Luck had no place in that room. A result you got once and could never get again was not a discovery. It was noise. The inciting truth of my whole career was sitting there on the bench: the real win is the one you can make happen on purpose, again and again, in front of anyone watching.
But the world outside the lab told a louder story. It said breakthroughs were lightning. The genius idea. The lucky founder in the right place at the right time. The overnight success.
So when I started designing digital products for African markets, used across 20 countries, I went looking for the lucky design direction, and it failed me at once. The clever concept that looked perfect on my screen broke the moment it met real life. Slow internet. Older phones. Users who had never seen a layout like mine. Every assumption was a wall I walked into.
The antagonist of this story is not a person. It is that comforting lie: that success arrives by luck. I watched founders chase it and quit at the first version that did not work, certain the winners had simply been luckier than them. For a while, I was tempted to believe it too.
Then I looked closely at the people who actually built things, and the lie broke.
Two engineers in Lagos, Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, set out in 2015 to fix one boring problem: African businesses could not easily take payments online. Their first version was not the answer. It was the first of years of fixes. In 2020, Stripe bought their company, Paystack, for over 200 million dollars. The biggest startup deal Nigeria had ever seen.
The world called it luck. I knew better. Five years of work do not fit in a headline.
That was my turning point. I chose the lab rule over the lightning for good.
But choosing the slow truth comes with a fear, and I will not pretend otherwise.
Building the deliberate way is lonely. Nobody claps for year two, when you are fixing the same flaw for the hundredth time while flashier launches get the applause. For a long stretch you cannot tell if your patience is wisdom or just stubbornness.
I feel it most now, building the National Data Library and data.gov.uk for the UK government. Infrastructure millions will quietly depend on. No luck allowed at that scale, only the method made visible. And still the question hangs over every careful step. Will the slow way hold when it matters most?
It does. That is the resolution I have staked my work on.
You do not need a luckier idea. You need to stay in the problem longer than the people who quit.
A win you cannot repeat is luck. A win you can repeat is a strategy. And a strategy, unlike luck, is something you can learn.
The headline takes years to write. The work starts the day you stop waiting for lightning.