My first company got its investment because one of my co-founders talked about it to a random stranger at a bar, who turned out to have money burning in his pocket.
I second your advice to get lucky.
Most of my 27 year career has followed as a domino from that. Once we'd paid back his investment and exited (for a pittance; the ISP marked we'd entered had become impossible for a small player), his lawyer happened to get a question from another client if he knew any software developers locally. That job led me to meet someone who left to start a company, and I followed. There I met one of the co-founders of my next startup. That startup hired a lawyer who later went on to hire me for one of his startups. The co-founder of that startup hired me for my current job.
There have been interludes that did not follow so directly, and there are certainly things I've done to help things along, but there are also many more examples of luck involved along the way too. I'm sure I could have gotten a lot less lucky and still done ok, or been more lucky and done better, but overall I've come out of a lot of things disproportionately well.
While skill etc. certainly also played a part - I'm not in any way suggesting that luck is sufficient -, my point was that most of these were intertwined in a way that meant they were dependent on that first domino. I probably would have done fine without it, but it'd have looked very different.
Even though my skills certainly also played a role, I could also have been equally skilled and taken another job and missed out on meeting the right people and ended up with far less satisfying outcomes. And many do. Or I could have been born somewhere where I wouldn't have had the same opportunities.
Luck and skill amplify each other, and a problem is that people often want to think it was all down to their skills. A lot of subsequent failures happen when people fail to learn the right lessons because they don't understand which parts of their earlier successes were down to luck and so try to copy the same approach in different conditions.
I second your advice to get lucky.
Most of my 27 year career has followed as a domino from that. Once we'd paid back his investment and exited (for a pittance; the ISP marked we'd entered had become impossible for a small player), his lawyer happened to get a question from another client if he knew any software developers locally. That job led me to meet someone who left to start a company, and I followed. There I met one of the co-founders of my next startup. That startup hired a lawyer who later went on to hire me for one of his startups. The co-founder of that startup hired me for my current job.
There have been interludes that did not follow so directly, and there are certainly things I've done to help things along, but there are also many more examples of luck involved along the way too. I'm sure I could have gotten a lot less lucky and still done ok, or been more lucky and done better, but overall I've come out of a lot of things disproportionately well.