How to increase your entrepreneurial happiness

Sam Altmann once said: Success requires hard work, a great product, a great team and financing. Once these conditions are met, one thing is still missing: happiness!

A good start-up always needs luck to get off the ground. But if you don’t have a good business model, luck won’t help you. Luck is unpredictable – and can be something like the right contact at the right time. As a young founding team, we do our best every day in our startup, but we will always need luck on our journey to building a company.

First the bad: You have no control over happiness. The good: these are also the preconditions that make happiness more likely to occur or manifest itself.

I often say that on the one hand you have to build up an opportunity or luck radar in order to recognize it and on the other hand that you can do a lot to increase the chance of luck. Let me give you an example: many things in my life feel like happiness, but if I had focused solely on my studies and done nothing else until my mid-twenties, the potential happiness would not have had a chance (unless my goal had been to investigate).

Due to my curiosity and enthusiasm at a young age, I was active in various projects from an early age. I co-founded a student start-up at the age of 15 or carried out projects with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the European Parliament “from scratch” in my early 20s – and at the time I didn’t know where it would take me lead or what I would do ‘later’, start with that. All I knew was that I would learn to always do my best and discover what skills I actually have and can contribute. Three years ago I finally co-founded the panty start-up Saint Sass. And then it is much more specifically about measurable success. But luck is no less relevant here, on the contrary. My co-founder once summed it up nicely with one sentence: Chance favors the fearless.

Wish me luck. I wish you the same from the bottom of my heart.

Vivien Wysocki is the founder of the fashion brand Saint Sass and politically active. She works as an international model, studied media management in Hannover and lives in Berlin. In the column you will find all previous articles here.