(FORTUNE Small Business) – How does Tom Peters--the guru to whom millions of entrepreneurs turn for the secrets to success--explain his own? Luck. Dumb luck. "We had a pretty good product with perfect timing that we had nothing to do with at all," he says. "Nothing!" Peters is sipping something lime green from a martini glass at Boston's Café Louis, waiting for his tuna tartar. "When things truly take off, 95% of it is hitting the market exactly right."

That "pretty good product," of course, was In Search of Excellence. Published in 1982, it has sold ten million copies around the world, spawned a new literary genre (popular self-help biz books), and inspired a sparkling new multimedia career (self-help biz guru) for Peters and the legions who followed. Since then Peters has had a hand in 11 books, nearly all bestsellers, including his latest, Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. He has a level-six "fee code" with the Washington Speakers Bureau (that's tops, in a league with Sarah, Duchess of York--Peters charges $75,000), a 500-acre farm in Vermont (paid for with Excellence royalties), and no need anymore to modulate his speaking voice (or even trim his eyebrows) in a way befitting the button-down McKinsey consultant he once was.

"[Co-author] Bob Waterman and I were pissed off," says Peters, remembering the turning point. "We were consulting to the big companies, and everything was dull and dreary and bureaucratic. Then we went out and talked to some other companies, like a young Hewlett-Packard, and it's not an exaggeration to say we discovered there's another way to live. We went into this world where people were behaving like human beings and doing things on the fly."

Not surprisingly, Peters was jazzed. The mystery is that he was able to reach an audience beyond MBA students--that's where he got lucky. This was 1982, remember, a bleak time in America when Japan was winning the economic wars. Peters's message touting traditional values--be nice; listen to customers; create collaborative, open workplaces--was welcome news. "The whole deal was that anything sensible in the world was Japanese, and Americans are idiots! So Bob and I find a couple of American companies that work. There's hope for business in America! Somewhere I read that during recessions, Disney movies and cosmetics do particularly well. We were a Disney movie for people who needed to hear that stuff in America actually works."

But this is Tom Peters! Once described in Fortune as the "ur-guru," he has benefited from our belief that he has something to teach us about success. How can he sit here insisting that he's really just been lucky all these years? You find that either highly disturbing or else, as I do, charming.

Bottom line: Peters is in a bind. Lucky at the outset, he's found it's hard work providing his public with the constant stream of insights they've come to expect, and it keeps getting harder. (It probably doesn't help that his wife, Susan Sargent, an artist turned entrepreneur who recently opened a home-furnishings store around the corner on Newbury Street, won't ask his advice.) How many times have we heard Peters preach about the "necessity for personal reinvention" or the death of the "implicit lifetime employment contract"? Well, he's still preaching. "Given that I get paid a lot of money to give speeches, I'm supposed to say something vaguely intelligent," he muses. "I just find it qualitatively more difficult to keep up in 2004 than I did in 1994, maybe even in 1999, certainly in 1984. There's just a lot of stuff going on!" Which is one reason--maybe the only reason--you should be glad you're not Tom Peters.