Luck is being prepared for opportunity as it presents itself.

I spend most of my time preparing.  A really short clip which I think captures how to prepare is this Tony Robbins video.  Tony has some really powerful and poignant ways about expressing concepts far better than my words could ever do here.  What I think this captures is how important focus and clarity are.  Two extremely important aspects of preparation.  If you want to be lucky in something; love, business, finance, whatever it is; you have to prepare for it and know precisely what you’re preparing for and why you’re preparing for it in order to actually create real and visible progress.  Clarity helps drive people forward and focus on exactly what they want to achieve by allowing them to prepare for it exactly how they envision and anticipate it.

Focus is clarity, and with that, you’ll hopefully someday be lucky.

Since the start of 2011 I’ve been traveling to a new country almost every other week. Wither it be Russia, Chile, Ukraine, UK, Serbia, Germany, New York, California, Japan or elsewhere, I always find it a complete pain and hassel to have a mobile device and be connected to work and communicate with the rest of the world.  It almost seems an impossible task.  My whole work is about working remotely; I’ve even read plenty of books about it (Enterprise Mobility being a good one), so I should at least be doing it myself.

If you’re from the USA, you know that almost no cell phones have SIM cards; this is a completely foreign concept to most Americans’.  The only phone that currently has a SIM card is the iPhone, and they say that if you buy it in America, you have a ‘locked’ version of it.  This is how it is marketed and told to the entire USA.  If you want to get an iPhone 4S that works internationally, you have to get a phone that is “unlocked”, which is a lot more expensive and really a pain to get your hands on.  The other options is to use your carriers international calling plan, which is outrageously expensive and does not always work.

Well, I’m here to tell you it’s all a complete lie.

Just before I was about to go to bed in Budapest, I was reading an article about the iPhone 4S and how there is ‘almost no need for an unlocked version anymore.’.  This came from someone who was very intelligent and well-traveled, so I thought it was odd, seeing how the person who was writing the article would obviously know the main reason would be to be able to use the phone internationally with SIM cards.  I stared at the article for about 60 seconds and thought to myself, “no way…. maybe it does work?….”.  I instantly jumped out of bed and took my other cheap international phone (which had a non-micro SIM card in it) and popped it out of my phone.  I took out a knife and carved the SIM card into the shape of a micro SIM card in about 5 minutes, and then stuck it in my iPhone 4S.

5 minutes later….after it said “searching…”; presto: Vodafone Service + 3G.

I could absolutely not believe it.  Everything everyone had been told by Apple, Steve Jobs, Sprint, Verizon, and everyone, was a complete lie just to make you think that you had to buy a more expensive phone, and just to make you think that you needed to use their international plan.

This was so shocking to people, that nobody I told the story to even believed me.  I had a friend came over to Budapest to visit me a few weeks later who works at Google; a smart guy.  He saw my iPhone 4S and said “Oh, you got an unlocked one?”, I told him, “No, you are not going to believe this, but international SIM cards actually work.  No iPhone 4S is ‘locked’, it’s all a lie, they just tell you this to make you think it and never have you try it.”.  His response was basically that he did not believe me, and it would be impossible that it just worked.

5 minutes later, it was working in his phone and he was absolutely blown away.  His jaw just laid open in shock, and he was completely baffled how this could actually be real.

I could not imagine that Apple, and such large companies would outright lie to you and just by having you think something create billions of dollars in sales (though this really is what brand marketing is all about anyways, it’s just hilarious they used it in a rather explicit technique here).

To make it even more hilarious, I went to the Apple store the next week in San Francisco because I lost my American-Sprint SIM card.  When I told them that I popped in a new SIM every time I’m in a a new country and lost the American one on a plane, they told me, “Oh, well you can’t do that, Apple does not allow it.  That’s only for unlocked phones.”  Amazing right?  They even lie to their own employees.

The odd thing about this is that, I looked online and could not find hardly one person or blog mentioning that they had done this successfully; I really think I was one of the first.  There are even question and answer sites stating that you can’t do this, and people saying it’s impossible, when they simply have not even tried it.

Looking back on it, I don’t think the person who wrote the article I was originally reading actually realized that you can use international SIM cards with these supposedly ‘locked’ iPhone 4S’s, but I’m glad it inspired me to do something which was novel, albeit extremely seemingly obvious.

It’s really amazing how just by trying something which someone says is impossible makes you win.  It’s probably why I’m sometimes #winning.

A funny thing happened to me the other day which I’ve been wanting to write about.

I walked into a cafe in Budapest called G4 right after after waking up.  The cafe is on Garabaldi Utca, right next to where I live.  The second I order some breakfast the waiter starts to talk to me about the resteraunt; what’s on the menu, when it was started, who the previous owner was.  I thought it was a bit strange but I really didn’t have a choice but to sit there and listen as I had already ordered and didn’t really mind to hear a bit of history on the place.

As he fixes up the orange juice and water for me, he starts talking to me from the bar, though I don’t really listen to him, as it’s kinda strange now.

So get this, as he walks over to me and places the water and orange juice that I order across the table… he also places a coffee directly across from me as if someone was sitting there.  I thought to myself, “hrm, either he left his coffee there by accident or he thinks I ordered one.”.  I didn’t make too much of it but I thought it was odd.

About fifteen minutes later, he comes back with my breakfast.  I’m simply checking the mail on my phone, and doing a bit of small work.  He places the meal down infront of me and sits down.  I look at him a bit perplexed, as it’s a two person table and we’re now sitting together… and he’s my waiter… so it’s quite strange.

He looks at at me and gestures as if he’s about to talk, pauses, and then just puts it out there..

“So listen, do you have access to large amounts of gold or cane sugar?  As in, metric tones of it?  I got a buyer, the Bank of China, they’ll by unlimited supplies.”.  With a completely straight face I just look at him and say, “Possibly.”.  I mean, who knows, I might!  I never really checked my network for that one.

Being in Budapest for the last few months, nothing really surprises me anymore, so I figured I would go along with it.  I continued and said, “I don’t really understand why you need me though, you can just go on LinkedIn, Facebook or Alibaba.com and get someone who might be a bit more targeted to your demography; you have absolutely no clue who I am; why me?”.

I don’t quite recall his explanation perfectly, but I do remember it was strange; something about my look and accent (I guess there’s a look to people with access to this much gold).  He then starts to go into details about the commodities business and how it all works, and he seemed informed enough and enthusiastic enough to share the information with me willingly as to how this entire business and industry operates.  We then started talking about ideas and ways to make a better Alibaba.com, which is actually quite fascinating and complicated.

We start talking numbers and he says that he can buy between $1-$7 trillion dollars worth of gold.  I didn’t really know what to make of that but I said “Well, I’ll do my best!  If I find someone I’ll let you know.”; not ever thinking this is going to be real or that I’m going to spent an ounce of my time on it.

Now, I don’t mind hanging or associating to people who are a bit on the edge, as you never really know what the future has in store for them; this guy seemed genuinely motivated.  Though… as I finished my meal (hastily), he gave me his Skype and said “Now… don’t talk about too much secrets on Skype, they are listening.”.  When he said that, I just labeled him as crazy, but really, who knows.  There are crazier people with crazier stories I’m sure.

The next morning though, a very strange thing happened.

I woke up and went to breakfast with one of my friends Jay Datesh who works out here at McKinsey in Budapest.  He was new here so I took him to the nicest brunch which I usually go to on Sundays.  It’s this absolutely top-notch 5-star hotel called the Corinthia; the brunch is seriously surreal.  I’ve never experienced anything like it before I’ve been there.  Thankfully I experience it almost every week now.

When we sit down, I start telling him the story (this one that I’m writing right here) about how I met this guy, and he randomly sat down to try to buy trillions of dollars worth of gold from me.  Jay then replied, “Oh no way man, I just met a guy who is trying to sell tones of gold and he came up to me in a bar asking if he knew any buyers!”.  I was really in shock and amazing simply by the symmetry of the coincidences lining up (definitely not by some remote possibility of a real opportunity being there.).

Jay is supposed to setup a meeting with the guy to talk how much gold he could sell.  I’m supposed to setup the meeting with the crazy guy from the cafe.  It has not happened yet, but if it does and something comes of it, I’ll certainly continue this one.