How exactly does luck lead to success in business and investing?

How do you measure your luck?

Let’s talk about that.

💸 “All of us are gifted with certain passions, and the people who are lucky are the ones who get to follow those things.”

Jeff Bezos

You and I have both said those words before.

“I got lucky”

When you forgot to do your work, but magically… it was already finished.

“I got lucky”

Years ago you walked away from a car crash with barely a scratch.

“I got lucky”

When you watch helplessly as one of your kids do a backflip off the bed…

and that horrible pause in the pit of your stomach before,

“I got lucky”

That time you found a hundred bucks on the ground.

Say it with me: “I got lucky”

But oddly, all those successful people, you read and hear about. They thank their luck too.

The mega famous and the uber successful entrepreneurs with a billion dollar startup always seem to have been in the right place at the right time.

Is this some kind of collective delusion?

Is it the fear of god?

Plain old superstition?

On days when we are feeling like crap, failing, not wanting to work at all. We blame our bad luck.

But when a great opportunity mysteriously arrives. We thank our good luck.

So what gives, is luck a good thing, a bad thing, or nothing?

And is it a money and investing thing?

🎲 Chance plays a larger role in our lives than we like to admit.
Nassim Taleb

How much of success is chance?

Is it a higher being?

Is it really just being in the right place at the right time?

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both born in 1955.

I was surprised to read in Forbes that there are over 2,800 billionaires. Seems like a lot.

Two of them, Gates and Zuckerberg, famously dropped out of Harvard.

But how often do you hear about the 29 Harvard graduates that also became billionaires?

Seems like if you want to be a billionaire, going to Harvard and graduating might be the better option.

Mumbai University in India has graduated 20 billionaires. Seems like India is catching up to America.

What would you say if I told you more than 800 billionaires are from China?

That’s a whopping 28.5%.

In 1972, Nixon visited China and ended 25 years of isolation and separation between the East and West.

In 1978, China’s GDP was 1/40 of the United States. Brazil was 10x as wealthy as China.

For almost 50 years, China’s economy has been growing at an incredible 8% a year.

Would you say that it was lucky to be born in China?

What’s the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to you?

⚾ Years ago I asked economist Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, “What do you want to know about investing that we can’t know?”

“The exact role of luck in successful outcomes,” he answered.

Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money

You can probably answer that question pretty quickly. Most of us have a moment.

So what’s the luckiest thing that ever happened to you?

That one unforgettable time when everything lined up right and it seemed like magic.

There is no logical reason. There is no cause.

You just got lucky, and deep down, you know it.

Keep your lucky moment in mind for now.

🏀 “We have had good fortune but not luck. Luck is for losers.”
Marquette basketball coach Al McGuire

The problem with always saying you got lucky, or blaming your bad luck is that you can’t count on luck.

But what if we could add up all the luck of successful people that have come before us?

Is their a method you can use to tilt luck in your favor?

In search of an answer, I looked at those truly blessed and miraculous lives and started to picked out all of the common patterns.

These moments might seem lucky when they happen once to you or I.

But randomness can be pinpointed, if we remove the noise from the sound and locate the signal.

When I was reading The Luck Factor, I stumbled across this whopper:

“The highest paid Americans read an average of two to three hours per day. The lowest paid Americans don’t read at all.”

So of course I kept reading.

Regardless of their schooling, all of the most successful people are life long learners with a passion for knowledge and discovery.

“There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Donald Rumsfeld

The problem with reading too much is that everything starts to seem connected. You have probably had one of these moments. You know the feeling, like you’re in The Matrix and all the dots start to line up.

You’re in a flow state. And the world just makes sense… for about 30 seconds. Then reality steps in and you think… what the hell was I thinking?

“The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.”

Nate Silver, The Signal and The Noise

In 1958, Psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined the term Apophenia to describe a human condition, when someone has “unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness“.

Apophenia is a symptom of delusional thinking, and often presents in early stages of paranoid schizophrenia. It is very common among men with a gambling problem.

🔫 Do you feel lucky punk?
Clint Eastwood,
Dirty Harry

Remember that time you got lucky?

Now I want you to start a conversation with 3-4 of your friends. It doesn’t really matter if it’s at work, or school or if you’re just sitting around the house.

Start a post on Facebook or a thread on Twitter. Or you could just make a Whatsapp group.

Ask each other about your luckiest moments.

Get all the juicy details. Share the specifics.

Go full detective mode. Get all 5 Ws. The proper who, what, where, why and when.

And make sure you share your story as well.

But most people will be happy to tell you there story, if you’re willing to listen.

I’d love to hear about your luckiest moment in the comments. The goal is to compare notes, and discover common patterns.

I know my luckiest moment by heart.

But I’ll get my bad luck bit out of the way first.

The problem is we think we can control our luck. You and I both believe and act as if we can decide the outcomes in our lives.

But what if we’re wrong?

We make assumptions about the right choice and the wrong choice. We think we can predict future outcomes.

But reality is way more complex than we imagine.

🎲 We often attribute skill where there is only luck; we mistake correlation for causation.
Nassim Taleb
Fooled by Randomness

Like many of you, I was in a really bad car accident once. It’s almost cliché, but it’s true.

But my story also has a surprise lucky ending.

Here are the details that matter:

I was 21. It was dark.

It was pouring rain.

My buddy and I had been drinking.

We got in the car to drive to town and meet some girls.

Luckily, we were on a curving country road.

Luckily, it was really pouring rain.

Luckily, he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

Luckily, I was driving a hundred miles an hour.

My buddy looked over at me and said, “Don’t kill me, man. I’ve got a daughter.”

Luckily, I could barely keep my eyes open.

So I barely saw the sheep or cow or whatever it was that stepped onto the dark wet road at the apex of a corner.

Luckily, there was no barrier and no guard rail to stop us…

So when we rolled the car went flying. And because my buddy didn’t have a seat belt, so did he. Ejected right through the windshield face first.

I wasn’t so lucky. I was buckled in, so when the car landed upside down, it crushed me and trapped me inside underneath and axel that had torn off.

I had to punch and kick my way out of the window and scrape myself along the ground.

Luckily, I am a fighter.

But the whole passenger side was destroyed. The right side of the car was crumpled like a stomped pop can.

I thought my buddy was dead for sure. His daughter wouldn’t have a father. His family would hate me. I was going to jail.

He landed fifty yards away in a the soft mud of a cow field, his impact softened by all the rain, his escape made possible because he was too negligent to put on a seat belt.

So you tell me, did we have bad luck or good luck that night twenty years ago?

And more importantly, how did I change my luck?

🎙️ “Good luck trying to find someone who cares like I do.”
Drake

The only way to change your luck is to keep showing up

There is no hack, no cheat code, and no short path to success in work, life, business or investing.

Are you are one of those people that still opens a ticker app every day and religiously looks at what’s up and what’s down in the market?

I’ve got news for you: you are 100% wasting your time.

If we measure your blood pressure and anxiety it would look like a long term market graph. Up and to the right.

Luckily, there is a simple and elegant solution to increase your odds of winning. And it works every time.

There is only one 100% guaranteed profitable, time tested method of savings and investing.

Las Vegas casinos ban card counters for life because they know the secret to consistently winning at Black Jack.

What percentage do you think the card sharks gain through card counting?

A measly 1-2% is enough to tilt the odds at the table in your favour.

The trick is to have enough money saved up to lose 48-49% of the time and be able to stay in the game.

🎲 “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for 10 years, don’t even think about owning it for 10 minutes.”
Warren Buffett

The simple way to increase your odds of winning is to stay in the game. The vast majority of people, and all of the losers, give up.

The message is simple: Do not quit too soon.

Remember all those billionaires?

There’s only one thing 90% of them have in common. They are over 50.

The median age of a billionaire is 67. That’s past the age of retirement. 42% of billionaires are over 70!

Every billionaire on earth under the age of 30 inherited their wealth.

But You and I can’t count on getting lucky.

We have to shift the odds in our favor by making a long term savings and investing strategy.

If you have read this far, you and I both know you can focus.

Remember, it is life long readers and learners win at the long game.

I can help you start now with a simple long term investment plan and a savings strategy that will guarantee you wins, if you’re patient.

The U.S. Stock Market had a 100% chance of profitability over 20 year periods in the last century.

Read that sentence again. It’s a fact.

But don’t let some fool financial advisor or bank eat up your dividends and compound interest with fees.

The answer is to automate, set your savings accounts and forget your investments.

A well balanced portfolio of long term investments can and will assure your success and wealth.

I can teach you how to earn real passive income while you sleep through saving, investing and sleeping better.

🌊 My mission: I will teach you how to do L.E.S.S.

Thanks for reading.

I write copy & content. I teach courses. I show up everyday.

But I do LESS. Learn. Earn. Save. Sleep.