Robert Frank was playing tennis one cold Saturday morning in Ithaca, N.Y., when his heart stopped. Sudden cardiac arrest—a short-circuit in the heart’s electrical signaling—kills 98 percent of its victims and leaves most of the rest permanently impaired.
Yet two weeks later, Frank was back on the tennis court.
How did this happen? There was a car accident a few hundred yards away from where Frank collapsed. Two ambulances responded but the injuries were minor and only one was needed. The other ambulance, usually stationed five miles away, reached Frank in minutes.
Yet two weeks later, Frank was back on the tennis court.
How did this happen? There was a car accident a few hundred yards away from where Frank collapsed. Two ambulances responded but the injuries were minor and only one was needed. The other ambulance, usually stationed five miles away, reached Frank in minutes.
“I’m alive today because of pure dumb luck,” says Frank, a 71-year-old economics professor at Cornell University. Or you can call it a miracle. Either way, Frank can’t take credit for surviving that day. From coincidence or the divine, he got help. Nine years later, he is still grappling with the concept of luck. And, applied to his field of economics, it’s led him into some dangerous territory: wealth.
HOW MUCH DOES LUCK COUNT
In fact, a prerequisite of success in many fields may be a strong refusal to believe in luck. The idea of “making your own luck” is great motivation, while nothing can kill your drive more than suspecting the game is rigged. The reality, however, is that luck does matter. It’s hard to see in your own life if things are going well
However Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or any other wildly successful person didn’t merely get lucky. “It’s clear that most of the biggest winners in the marketplace are both extremely talented and hardworking,” Frank
For more than 15 years of my personal experience with investments top performers take home the bulk of the rewards. More and more of the economy is starting to look like sports or music, where millions of people compete and the winners are paid thousands of times more than the runners-up.
Frank writes:
Winning a competition with a large number of contestants requires that almost everything go right. And that, in turn, means that even when luck counts for only a trivial part of overall performance, there’s rarely a winner who wasn’t also very lucky.
So how to make things fair
We can’t control our luck, so what else can we do? The only solution is to invest more in education and infrastructure and all the other things we know help everyone succeed. The more we spend on these public goods, the more people have a chance to get lucky, he says. That, of course, means higher taxes. .
Which would you rather drive, a $150,000 Porsche on a well-maintained highway, or a $333,000 Ferrari on roads with deep potholes? The question scores a couple points.
For me a disciplined approach in investing and dedication and passion to your work shall eliminate lack of luck to a great extent.In my professional carrier where i have read investors emotions I have noticed happy go lucky always end up creating much higher welath compared to ones who guard there investments 24X7
loved this quote
“The fact that anyone exists at all is so astronomically improbable,” Frank says. “The fact that you’re here to live and breathe and enjoy a sunset–what an unbelievably unlikely thing.”
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