How To Increase Your Odds Of Success.
Today, we are going to talk about how you can improve the odds of you changing your life. There is one thing you can do that will separate you from your competition.
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So I met a friend of mine yesterday, who I haven’t seen for a long time, and he reminded me of stuff that I said when I was telling him when we were together in the Philippines. And he repeated what I told him and he said that this was a very good life experience for him and he was trying to get to that point right.
See what he said was basically that what he likes about me is that instead of just talking about stuff, I actually go and try it. So you know because you have a lot of people who wish that had more freedom but the only thing to do is talk about it and they don't you to go and try.
And he said “I admire you because you have the courage to go out there and try it”. I told them that in business you only have to get it right once. So you can try a lot of things. Some of them might not stick but one will work OK. And that brings me to a point that I wanted to make today and I'm going to tell you a story for this point.
When I was doing my round the world tour, I stopped in Mexico. So Mexico was my first stop.
And well you know my Spanish at the time wasn’t what it used to be. I was actually traveling in the beginning with a buddy of mine, and he is half Spanish. So he was obviously fluent in Spanish and proficient but I didn't speak any Spanish, like zero. So since I was with him all the time I was relying on him to make conversation.
So I speak five languages now and two of these languages are French and Italian. All right. They're very close to Spanish. So I was confident that I could go there and like navigate a little bit and survive by using like Italian words that were way closer to Spanish than French was. So when I got there sometimes I tried forming a sentence but you know I could see that I was making a lot of mistakes and I was using wrong words that.
So we were there for like around like a month or something and then afterwards my buddy left and I ended up in a situation where it was life or death my friend. So basically I was on my own now and I had to speak Spanish right. So up until this point what happened was that you know in the in the conversations.
So you have this option. If the language is close to another language you know. OK. So I mean my case it was very close to French and Italian. So sometimes I was paying attention. I was trying to understand the general meaning of the sentence because I can do that. .
So anyway the option that I took during this whole month was trying to figure out what people were saying. So I was sucking in all this information that got stuck in my brain somewhere you know. And I ended up in a situation where, well it was just me, and I had to survive there. My buddy wasn't there anymore and I had to speak Spanish, but all of a sudden all these words that I had in my head they started coming in handy.
How To Increase Your Odds Of Success
So what happened was that before as I said, I was not terrified but I was ashamed of like making mistakes. And I think the main reason why I was ashamed of making mistakes was because my buddy was there. But you can make mistakes with strangers and you don't care.
I think everybody has a person like this that's preventing you from like expressing yourself the way you like to. OK. Well anyway so my point was that when my buddy was there, I didn't want to look silly or whatever but now that he wasn't there anymore, it took me three days and I'm really amazed.
So I met a girl and started talking to her for three days but I didn't care about making mistakes or anything. She would correct me and sometimes when you're learning, some people can be offended like wow you're correcting me all the time and let me speak and stuff but it was good.
You're learning a language and someone's correcting you. But three days I was like “dude I don't care about making mistakes and I need to learn Spanish right”. And after three days it was a complete transformation.
It's a crazy transformation because it took me three days of actually practicing and stuff. So I'm not saying it's like common or anything or I'm not saying I'm a genius right. I'm saying that I was listening for a while and then afterwards once I started talking, things started to click.
Then you have light bulbs in your head and stuff. And this is what happened to me. All these words that I heard before now that I could use them you know because they were somewhere in my brain. So that's how I ended up speaking Spanish.
The reason why I'm telling you this is that what changed for me was the fact that I didn't care about making mistakes. I didn't care. I was just trying my Spanish and stuff. And this is something you can do as well in business. You try this and that and what will happen is that stuff that you've learned before, you will start to connect it all.
So that's it. This is the key. Like this very simple sentence. If you never try you will never know. All right. So some people are too afraid. They're so afraid of making a mistake that they never try and maybe it could have worked, but they never tried it, so they never actually get to their goals. If you try, you have a better chance of making it work.
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About the Author
Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.
Related Reading
- FBC – 4 Part 1 – This is the story of my life: Success, Failure and The Hurdles.
- FBC – 3 – Escape your life of sacrifice! Don’t settle for less than your dream lifestyle.
- FBC – 8 – The Weirdest Challenge To Boost Your Confidence
- Other really cool tips that will give you an unfair advantage
Frequently Asked Questions
How do entrepreneurs measurably increase their odds of success?
By stacking small advantages no single competitor can copy. A list of 1,000 emails, a clear niche, a tested offer, a documented process, and a network of 10 operators ahead of you each move the odds 5 to 10 percent. Stacked, they push a 20 percent baseline to 60 percent or more.
What single decision most increases the odds of business success?
Picking a market that already pays for similar solutions. Founders who choose validated demand and differentiate on positioning succeed at three to five times the rate of founders who pick novel markets. Demand validation in advance is the highest-leverage decision available, and most beginners skip it.
How does mentorship change the odds of success in entrepreneurship?
Access to one operator two steps ahead can compress two years of trial and error into six months. The leverage is on avoided mistakes more than added insights. Mentorship paid for in cash or favors usually has a higher return than equivalent spending on tools, ads, or hires.
What everyday habits keep success odds compounding?
Weekly review of metrics, monthly review of strategy, quarterly review of bets. Most founders skip the review loop and run on memory. Reviewing on a fixed cadence catches drift before it becomes wasted quarters. The habit costs three hours per month and consistently outperforms ad hoc reflection.
Further reading
- Martin's Substack: long-form essays on building a business that runs without you on Martin's Substack.
- Freedom by Choice Podcast: background interviews and freedom-business case studies on the Freedom by Choice Podcast.
- Harvard Business Review: research on solo and founder-led operations from Harvard Business Review.
- HubSpot Blog: sales and marketing benchmarks on the HubSpot Blog.
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