For my part I do believe luck has played a strong role for me as opposed to good management. Very much a grasshopper as opposed to an industrious ant.
There is some good management …I founded and ran a small Mac computer company in Canada for 37 years …now had I put a few of the dollars I earned into Apple stock…I’d not be a poor pensioner.
My best friend in Uni who I regularly chat with on line did indeed put $10k or so in Apple stock at a low point and sits with a $300k nest egg as part of his good management.
Luck played a role for me getting out of my company without dire consequences for me and my major investor when my US partner offered a $250k buyout …something we had talked about for a decade.
Good management on my part to nurture it along.
Good luck that it happened finally after 10 years just before covid hit.
I said yes to the offer very quickly.
I landed okay in my dotage in Australia with no personal wealth and fortunate to have a tolerant partner who is the exemplar of good management.
Lucky I answered that personal ad some 13 years ago.
There are many other events in my life where I feel luck played a larger role than managing well. Anyone else?
Some luck, in that I avoided potentially bad results from foolish choices when young (most related to substance use.) Good management in that I followed a conservative course that has paid off over time.
But mostly, I would say genetic luck, in that I was born to pretty intelligent upper middle class parents who valued education. I KNOW I was born on 3d base.
I’ve been mainly lucky in my circumstances. I’ve been very conservative in my financial management, and it has served me well. But a lot of those financial decisions took advantage of lucky breaks. My financial practices got me a good credit rating which got me a good home loan. But it was a lucky short term downturn in the housing market that allowed me to pay a much lower price for my house.
It’s kind of hard to quantify, but I’ve definitely been lucky by being a male WASP. Not overtly lucky inasmuch as generally getting a better deal in life. I think I get better rates and deals than a lot of other groups. And just better treatment overall.
Good Luck: I was born in a family with wonderful parents who had good jobs and with an older brother who is the “big brother” any sister would love to have. They picked the right name, “Jasmine”, because I had the childhood and high school life any princess would be happy with.
Bad Luck: Both of my parents were killed when I was 16. They were coming home from a dinner date with friends and a van, fleeing the police and traveling at an insane speed, broad sided them and killed them instantly. My brother had graduated and joined the Air Force, and the only reason I wasn’t with them is that I had to cheer with my squad at a game.
Management: My brother was 6 months from the end of his stretch, and the Air Force awarded him an honorable discharge because of a family emergency, and the court awarded him guardianship over me because I was almost an adult and he was considered a responsible veteran. Tons of counseling, love, and time added to the “management”.
While I did get good genes for health and longevity, I have had to work my ass off to forge the cardiovascular system that I have. I could have instead easily ballooned to 300+ pounds by now if I hadn’t. [my peak was 243, 173 now]
Thanks for explanation.
My parents were poorly educated, grade 3 and grade 8 and I had to fight my way out of the religious miasma til I hit uni which they did support. Some wandering salesman convinced my mother to buy a set of Richardon’s Topical Encyclopedias and the world open.
Little did my mother know the pandora’s box she opened…pandora for her, enlightenment for me.
In uni I met my second family ( one of the profs) and that aided in withdrawing from the parochial fundie community I grew up in.
I never slept at the house I grew up in again. They were in truth my second family and interwoven with my life in so many ways for 60 years. Big time luck to find my way out.
•••
I also have longevity genes - dad driving legally to 95 and both alive to mid 90s…I’d nver been to a funeral til I was in my 60s and wrote dad’s eulogy. I’m 77 now and still riding motorcycle.
Ozempic was my route to getting back some health …60lb lighter with little effort. Beta blocker has improved my heart function - partnering up with a long time research nurse has been good management which she oversees.
Luck that she was near by when I got hit with sepsis last month which despite quick response nearly took me out. Good management we were 10 min from the hospital…sepsis …the unknown condition that kills more than heart and stroke combined
Look it up if you don’t know …I didn’t.
What a cool metaphor, though admittedly US-centric.
I recognize that I was born on 1st base, forever gazing at those others farther ahead. Nobody was sending me to college, but there was always a stable home and food.
Following the metaphor, I imagine myself turning around, looking off the field, and realizing just how large the crowd of people is who weren’t even allowed to play the game.
Yes certainly luck involved with parents, position and genes, not much good management in play there tho knowing when to cut the apron strings…good management.
Compared to the vast population of the planet …all here at got a head start.
Yep …plays a big role…reminds me of Steve Jobs and Woz when the cops decided not to pick them up on phone hacking.
Cops turned up and questioned them about the blue box. Wozniak managed to convince an officer that the blue box was a synthesizer, even playing a few tones to demo the device. Incredibly, the cop bought the whole story, letting them go—they even got their blue box back.
Luck even for the planet.
“If we hadn’t made blue boxes,” Steve Jobs said in 1998, “there would have been no Apple.”
Good Luck - stable home life as a child, my father ran a small company and we had enough money to have a home, a few luxuries, and all the kids can go to college. I had brains but was a lazy student, wound up at a good university, got a BS and an MBA and passable grades throughout.
Good Management - Got a job, did well enough at the job to get occasional raises, and avoid getting culled during numerous “Reductions In Force”. Avoided major money issues, invested wisely though not brilliantly. I’m not exactly rolling in it, but I have two homes, a few luxuries and my kid can go to college. I also have enough socked away that I expect to be able to retire.
Most of my luck had to do with my birth and upbringing, I had few hurdles in my way to be successful, and haven’t been hit with any particular bad luck bringing me down. The rest has been pretty much showing up every day and doing my job.
I was a sorta smart, very curious, mostly aimless, utterly ambitionless, lazy kid who transitioned into a slightly less smart, somewhat curious, mostly aimless, utterly ambitionless, profoundly lazy adult.
I was raised by a loving, well-educated but variously working poor to working lower middle-class family. Wanted for little and was always secure and fed, probably even a little spoiled. Wandered through college studying various subjects and treating it as an intellectual hobby for many years. Worked part-time jobs to pay my (cheap) tuition, books, clothes, transportation and entertainment, but lived at home with free room and board.
Lucked into a well-paid, low stress government job partly through family connections. Worked there for ~35 years and iterated myself through a couple of different non-management positions. I am currently in the process of retiring with a decently-funded quality pension and adequate (but not free) healthcare.
I am a functional, reasonably financially secure cog in society. But I didn’t have to struggle hard to get there, but rather fell over backwards into it. Which is just as well, because left to my own devices it’s hard to say just how I would have sorted myself out.
For me, good management matters most, but being lucky doesn’t hurt. I’m divorced, own my own home, I’m healthy, and I’m financially comfortable, assuming the economy doesn’t crater over the next 20 years. I can do what I want, when I want, with whomever I want, or I can do nothing at all.
I have a daughter and grandson I spend five months a year living with, and I spend the rest of the time in sparsely populated Western Montana. I’ve made good decisions throughout my life, thanks in part to being raised by caring parents who encouraged me to go to college —a decision that was very smart back in the day. I couldn’t ask for anything more.
I’ve had some of both. I was born to working class parents who put me through college. Working on the farm made a lot of jobs seem not so bad. One day I saw an ad for a mutual fund in Runner’s World magazine, and I started having $75 per month put in a fund. It exploded, and as a result when I married and had a kid there was enough for a 20% down payment on our house. We put the little that was left in an education account and forgot about it. We’ve done a pretty good job of saving, which means we have a few hundred thousand socked away. Good thing, since I retired at 60 and don’t have a huge pension. Back to the education fund; we ended up opening 529s for both kids. Recently I saw that the education fund we opened when our now 27 year old daughter was a baby had grown from $500 to $4000 dollars. Both kids have now graduated, so we recently split it between them. It came at a time when our daughter really needed it, so it was very welcome. In conclusion, there has been plenty of both.
I feel like a healthy mix of all three (good, bad, management) contributed to my current circumstances.
Bad luck:
I had an extensively abusive and unstable childhood, the kind that leaves you with lifetime scars. I had to legally emancipate at age 17. Because of this I just have to live with a lot of issues most people don’t have: problems coping, frequent derailment by extreme emotions, sleep disturbances, really negative self-perception.
Didn’t grow up with a lot of money
Really prone to illness. I have several chronic health conditions, including multiple psychiatric conditions that have in the past been severe enough to require hospitalization. I had a hernia at age 14. I have IBS, presumed endometriosis, PMDD, asthma, etc. I also had undiagnosed ADHD for 37 years.
I’m short and fat. It sucks. I’m of average attractiveness. I had terrible acne in junior high, it was miserable.
I entered the workforce in 2007 which statistically has had a huge negative impact on my lifetime earnings.
Medical expenses, therapy bills and medication have also disadvantaged me economically
None of that’s great. But for reasons that perplex me, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of incredible luck:
I was very smart, and academically gifted from a young age
Very loving grandparents
My Aunt, who was my continuous lifeline and support
Supportive teachers and friends
Attended an elite university and got a full-ride scholarship because of where I happened to move that year (plus grades)
When I struggled in college due to severe depression and PTSD, administrators went out of their way to help me keep my scholarship
Met the love of my life at age 19! How many people have that?! I’ve never been alone my entire adult life
The love of my life by sheer happenstance came from a rich family
He’s super attracted to me and well out of my league
Several windfalls as a result of his family’s wealth
Attended top program for graduate school, lucked out with scholarships again, for half my tuition
Attended a writers group one time and the eight of us happened to fit together perfectly. We’ve been great friends for ten years
In 2015, somehow managed to find a job that has continuous positive feedback, work-from-home flexibility and autonomy and a fairly light workload. Since 2022 it pays better than the majority of comparable jobs because my boss taught me how to negotiate hard when I was offered a promotion. After almost ten years there I have a lot of respect, a lot of freedom, and a lot of vacation time. And I’m deeply passionate about the work I do. Pretty much dream job.
In 2020 I had a child, and this child, you can’t imagine how great he is. He’s passionate and funny and silly like his mother, and he has an enormous heart. And on top of all that, he has an extraordinary brain and is the smartest person I know. When I think about the sheer statistical likelihood of having this exact child, it blows me away how lucky I got.
Good management:
I’ve engaged in copious amounts of therapy to avoid the mistakes of my parents, working diligently on my mental health for decades
I married really well. I thought it through rationally. It was a principled decision.
I’ve made good choices in who to be friends with
I’ve been a good steward of money
As a wife and friend I’m incredibly loyal
I’m always working on improving myself
I tend to really think things through before I make a decision
I put a lot of effort into all facets of my life
I’m persistent as hell. I will keep at things long after most people would quit. For reference: the year I legally emancipated, one of the most traumatic years of my life, I held down a full-time job while keeping straight-As, doing all the extracurriculars, taking some college level classes, and graduated Salutatorian with 13 senior awards. I was not gonna let some pesky trauma derail my life goals.
I really think on the whole though, I’ve been stupid lucky. Just on the basis of my love and my son alone, never mind all the other crazy luck.
Bad luck turned good because I managed the process:
I got my 1-A notice while in college in 1967. I thought my world had just come to an end. It turned out that the travel I had always seen in books was about to come true, along with an education that isn’t taught in books or classrooms.
Career management:
My last tour in the service was with the State Department. I leveraged that into becoming a direct hire for State when I retired, and met my new wife along the way.
All that experience allowed me to land other management jobs outside of government, and to retire at 61 with money in the bank and a good retirement income.
Luck: We bought our condo in AK in a down market and sold it in an up market. Bought our home in Portland in a rising market and got double that amount back when we sold it.
I was raised in a lower class but loving family. My parents were smart but uneducated. I was a B+ student, from getting A in all math and science courses and B in everything else. My college boards were similar (around 1300). I got into several colleges but no scholarship (there concept of need-based aid didn’t exist in 1954). For example, I was admitted to Penn, but their $700 tuition could have been $7,000,000 for all I had a chance of paying it.
Then, incredible good luck! I was scanning the help wanted ads and there was an ad for a lab technician. I called them and was invited for an interview. It was a lab at Penn and they explained that they had a kind of program where I would work full-time at the lab and take courses in the night school. Taking 9 credits each regular term and 3 credits each of the two summer terms added up to 24 credits each year and after 5 years, I would graduate with 120 credits. Having nothing better to do, I jumped at the job.
Second stroke of luck: In the fall a year later I was taking calculus and I overheard two of the grad students at the lab having. I wandered over to listen. It turned out that one of the students was taking a course called modern algebra and having trouble. The other student was explaining an exercise to him and I was intrigued. I ended up taking that course the following year and I was hooked. I have worked in modern algebra for my entire career.
Third stroke: meeting my wife, just about 62 years ago.
Tho I made the one observation above about my current life, I would never dream about sorting out my life’s path in the categories like the above. It’s one seamless tapestry and if I were to remove one thread the entire thing might start to unravel. Plus a seeming “misfortune” could have lead me down other, unexpected paths that I wouldn’t otherwise have explored, as in who am I to declare that something was lucky or not?
Thanks for explanation.