I have before me here a lottery ticket. Now, if I were to win this, I would stand to earn a fortune; every single financial problem in my life would basically disappear overnight. In reality, this piece of paper that I have here is worthless. Why is that?
Well, the thing is lottery tickets are called an idiot tax for a reason. The chances of you actually winning are tiny and, as a consequence, you are just wasting your money. However, to succeed in life, you do need lottery tickets. You don’t quite know how or when lightning will strike but you can learn to harness it – at its core you need to learn how to benefit from randomness and get metaphorical lottery tickets that are worth the cost incurred.
Say for example, with these articles I’m mainly using them to advertise my writing projects. What I do to produce them is, first, I film a video, then rip the audio, transcribe the audio, and at the end of the day, I have a video, a podcast, and an article, which I can post widely. As consequence, I don’t know which of the three things will work, but I have increased my chances; I don’t know when lightning will strike, but I bring as many lighting rods as I can possibly bring to the occasion.
That is how you maximise your chances of success. You are open to the possibilities, and, to a certain extent, that is what successful people do. Very rarely will you hear about someone that just happened to succeed in the first time that they attempted something.
Napoleon, for example, was very aware of that. There is a story that, whenever his field-marshals would bring a new potential general to him he would listen to all the magnificent characteristics that this man had, and then he would say “Well, that is all fine, but is the man lucky?”, and upon first hearing it, it seems like a bizarre phrase. I mean, this is a man who from being an impoverished, third-rate aristocrat, rose to the occasion through cunning and merit to become the most powerful man in Europe, and he is asking whether someone is lucky?
The thing is Napoleon was very well aware of the role that luck plays in our life. He viewed it as a by-product of genius, as an ability to behold. He actually used the phrase: “All great events hang by a hair; I believe in luck, and the wise man neglects nothing which contributes to his destiny.” And that is the nature of success, at least according to Napoleon. Now, of course there are types of success – types of luck – that are not really dependent on the individual. Say, for example, whether you were born in the right family, in the right time, in the right place, none of those factors are under your control but they will deeply affect your life. However, time is the ultimate meritocracy. Give an idiot enough rope, and he’ll eventually hang himself.
Studies actually suggest that the vast majority of people who end up winning the lottery, actually go broke in under a decade. Why? Because they didn’t have the capacity to be able to be rich – same happens with those who are born rich.
There is a very good book called “The millionaire next door” which suggests that millionaires more often than not became rich by their own hand. Depressingly though that fortune is lost within a generation or two. The heirs to vast estates are rarely meritorious of these vast fortunes and they quickly lose them, as they don’t know how to deal with the responsibilities.
Yes, there is the random throw of the dice, there is the type of luck where, say, if you play Russian roulette, it’s doubtful that there is any degree of skill involved. But, if you are open to opportunities, if you are willing to be flexible in how you approach life, if you are willing to forgo conventional notions, then that is how you achieve success on a consistent basis.
I’ve always tried to apply this knowledge to the best of my abilities. By way of example, I got into university, despite the fact that I didn’t have the proper grades (because I was always a bit of a rebel when it came to academic success because I was constantly debating teachers). Yet I got into higher studies and I managed to live in Europe, because I wrote a letter to the head of my potential school, and through that letter I managed to convince him to give me a chance. Same happened when I finished university, and I had to find a job.
In total, I sent an eye-watering 868 applications over the course of the next six months. This was a consistent string of months where I was failing and failing despite my highest hopes. But this is also the period when I wrote my book Cavemen with Smartphones: how evolution shaped history and finance.
I was unemployed, bumming around Europe, rapidly utilising what little saving I had, but I was still able to utilise this time both to write a book that I’m very proud of, and I also managed to send an inordinate amount of applications. Nowadays if I hear someone complaining about the fact that they applied to a dozen, or even a hundred jobs, and not gotten an interview, I just laugh internally. Because I had to overcome the fact that there were times where I actually got an interview, and it lasted less than thirty seconds. Reason being that often, after I said that I needed a visa sponsorship, they just hung up on me. This happened on more than one occasion; I was unlucky there. But I was very lucky in getting a job that fit the criteria that I wanted, and I only really applied as a joke! However, that only happened after almost a thousand approaches.
I am not interested in the success of any one circumstance, I’m interested in success over the long haul. And that is the thing: through failure came experience, and with experience, I started to understand the underlying rules, the underlying procedures that guaranteed my success, and I think that is what is needed to succeed. You need to have a hard skin to be able to withstand the failures that are inevitable and chug through them. Until lightning does strike and you can benefit from it.
Try things that society doesn’t expect you to do. If you follow the tried- and true method, you will get average results. If you try your own path, then the end destination is whatever you make of it.
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Original video:
My website: www.richardamador.com