Lucky Smart

In last week’s arti­cle I talked about long-term dou­ble mar­ket returns and whether or not they could just be luck. The sta­tis­tics sug­gest­ed that isn’t the case.

But how much of suc­cess in life is luck? Is “work hard to be suc­cess­ful” a myth worth exam­in­ing?

This week I was read­ing “Rich­er, Wis­er, Hap­pi­er” by William Green and he tell this cute sto­ry about Howard Marks:

“I once gave an inter­view in which I men­tioned that Marks has a high IQ, which has no doubt con­tributed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to his suc­cess. In response, he sent me a charm­ing­ly mod­est email, remark­ing, “Peo­ple who don’t ful­ly acknowl­edge their luck miss the fact that being intel­li­gent is noth­ing but luck. No one does any­thing to ‘deserve’ a high IQ.”

War­ren Buf­fett believes his suc­cess is large­ly due to luck, and once said that “out of eight bil­lion peo­ple, I may be one of the 10 luck­i­est in the world.” He said it was an “acci­dent” that he gained ear­ly expo­sure to the world of finance thanks to his stock­bro­ker father.

“If my father had been a plumber,” he said, “I would not have had the same advan­tage I had.” He has a nat­ur­al tal­ent for invest­ing which has been so much more lucra­tive than if he’d been a “great vio­lin play­er or any­thing else.”

I’m a big believ­er in the role luck plays in life and that we should embrace it hap­pi­ly. I tell Hunter and Tay­lor all the time, that being smart and work­ing hard are great, but, at the end of the day, a lot of life comes down to dumb luck.

I always go back to that Al Paci­no speech in “Any Giv­en Sun­day”:

“You find out life’s this game of inch­es. So is foot­ball because in either game, life or foot­ball, the mar­gin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too ear­ly and you don’t quite make it. One half sec­ond, too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inch­es we need are every­where around us.”

He’s talk­ing about a work eth­ic, but I hear it as a sto­ry about luck. Some­times you’re an inch (or a week or a year) too ear­ly (like start­ing a pod­cast net­work in 2004, a few years before iPhones and 5G came along). Some­times you’re an inch (or a year) too late. You’re Gwyneth Pal­trow in Slid­ing Doors, miss­ing the train home. Or you’re Ethan Hawke in Before Sun­rise, meet­ing the right per­son at the wrong time.

Back in 2004, not long after I’d quit my job at Microsoft, I was hav­ing a sies­ta in the mid­dle of a week day (as you do) when I dreamed that one of my ances­tors, some Irish pota­to farmer from a few hun­dred years ago, got to see how I lived. There I was, in an inner Mel­bourne three-bed­room town­house with piped heat­ing and air­con, clean run­ning water, plen­ty of food in my kitchen, health care, books, no brig­ands try­ing to burn my house down, no maraud­ing armies, and enough mon­ey saved up that I could afford to quit my job at 34 and take a year off to think about what I want­ed to do with the rest of my life. They would think I was some kind of lord or a mem­ber of the land­ed gen­try. But I had real­ly done noth­ing to deserve it. I was in that sit­u­a­tion most­ly because I was just very lucky.

I was lucky to be born in Aus­tralia in 1970, grow­ing up with Whit­lam’s health care and edu­ca­tion. I’m lucky that I’ve nev­er had to fight in a war. I’m lucky that my grand­fa­ther, father and chil­dren did­n’t have to go to war, either. I’m lucky that I was born with all of my limbs and organs work­ing prop­er­ly. I’m lucky to be rel­a­tive­ly smart and to have always had a healthy appetite for learn­ing new things. I was lucky to dis­cov­er pod­cast­ing as a career in 2004. For a guy who loves to read books and talk about what he learned, that was the ulti­mate “job” (instead of just bor­ing my work col­leagues and spouse). For 22 years I’ve been able to just talk about things I’m inter­est­ed in for a liv­ing. It was luck that put me in Chris­sy’s path in Ajac­cio, Cor­si­ca, in 2008 (unlike Before Sun­rise, which we’d both seen, we did over­come liv­ing on dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents to make it work). I was lucky to meet Tony not long after that, and that he liked me enough (or found me weird enough) to want to be my friend.

I was even lucky when, aged 13, I got my skull frac­tured when some drunk idiot at the Bund­aberg gun range pressed the “pull” but­ton on the auto­mat­ic clay tar­get throw­er with­out warn­ing me first (I was kneel­ing in front of it, load­ing it — that was my week­end job). I should have died — as it turns out, I just have a big sec­tion of dead brain mat­ter (which is my go-to excuse when I do some­thing stu­pid). I was lucky at age 18 when I drank myself uncon­scious at a Citibank Xmas par­ty and woke up in a bath­room stall at 3am cov­ered in my own puke. I could have eas­i­ly end­ed up like Bon Scott. I was lucky a year lat­er when I met one of my first teach­ers, “Sailor” Bob Adam­son, who recon­nect­ed me with non-dual phi­los­o­phy (eg Zen Bud­dhism and Advai­ta Vedan­ta) and prob­a­bly saved my life as a result.

I was lucky last week that Chris­sy did­n’t choke on a piece of cau­li­flower. I’m lucky that I dis­cov­ered kung fu when I was 50 and my health was declin­ing.

I guess I could say I’ve also had a lit­tle “bad luck” along the way — the GFC wiped out my ear­ly pod­cast­ing momen­tum, I’ve had two busi­ness part­ners screw me over, I’ve had a cou­ple of failed mar­riages… but real­ly, I think I’m Char­lie Sheen-lev­el #WINNING on the luck scales, all things told. Lots and lots of luck.

Back to the Green’s book (to keep it some­what invest­ing relat­ed):

“One way that Marks keeps his own ego in check is by remind­ing him­self of the star­ring role that luck has played in his life. After read­ing Mal­colm Glad­well’s book Out­liers, which explores var­i­ous caus­es of suc­cess, Marks com­piled a list of lucky breaks that have helped to pro­pel him to where he is today. His streak began with the “demo­graph­ic luck” of being born to white, mid­dle-class par­ents in the Unit­ed States at the start of a gold­en era of post­war growth… ”

What is luck? As a con­firmed eter­nal­ist, I think of it as the sim­ply laws of nature play­ing out. I wear an old rusty bike cog around my neck on a piece of leather string. When peo­ple ask what it means, I tell them that it reminds me that I’m just a cog, part of a big­ger machine (the uni­verse) and that I start­ed a phi­los­o­phy called “Cogism” (it has a mem­ber­ship of one).

As the Athen­ian play­wright Euripi­des (Euripi­des pants, Eumenides pants!) remarked near­ly twen­ty-five hun­dred years ago, “How can you think your­self a great man when the first acci­dent that comes along can wipe you out com­plete­ly?”

Acknowl­edg­ing luck doesn’t dimin­ish the work we’ve done. It just stops us pre­tend­ing that we cre­at­ed all of the con­di­tions that made the work pos­si­ble. Learn to laugh at your luck, both the bad and the good. Embrace the cog.

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QAV Myth Killers is a week­ly col­umn in the QAV newslet­ter, tak­ing apart a piece of
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