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Everybody is trying to be the winner.
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There are thousands, often tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of contestants in these winner-take-all contests.
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There are natural limits on how hard you can work and how smart you can be, so there are lots and lots of people bumping up against those natural limits.
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Let s find the contestant out of the many thousands of them who is the smartest, hardest working in the whole set.
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How lucky will he be?
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Well, since we ve chosen him without regard to luck, only because he was the hardest working, most talented, his luck will be neither good nor bad.
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It ll be average on the luck scale.
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Today we re talking with Robert H. Frank.
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He s a professor at Cornell and the author of Success and Luck, Good Fortune, and the Myth of Meritocracy.
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We re going to talk about the role of luck, talent, and hard work.
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It might not be quite the mixture that you think.
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Why we tend to minimize the role of luck in our success.
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how to maximize our luck in life, of course, by way of concepts outside that of talent and work, and ways to look at the luck factor and turn it to our advantage.
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Enjoy this episode with Robert H. Frank, and of course, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the AOC Toolbox, where we discuss things like reading body language, having charismatic nonverbal communication, negotiation techniques, the science of attraction, networking, influence strategies,
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mentorship, persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at The Art of Charm.
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Check that out at theartofcharm.com slash toolbox.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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Alright, here s Robert H. Frank.
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Well, thanks for being here with us today as well.
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And it seems like, speaking of luck, you re actually kind of lucky to be here after what happened on a tennis court one day.
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Why don t we start with that?
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Sure.
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I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and co-author.
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Tom Gilovich is his name.
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He s a psychologist here at Cornell.
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It was November.
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It was cold out.
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He tells me that during the second set, as we sat during a changeover, I complained about feeling nauseated.
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And then the next thing he knew, he tells me I had rolled off the bench.
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I m lying still on the tennis court, no breath, no pulse.
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He realized that something gravely is the matter.
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He flipped me over onto my back.
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He called out for others to call 911.
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And then he started pounding on my chest.
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And he said that after a long time, what seemed like a long time, he got a cough out of me.
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But then I went limp again.
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And he was about to give up hope when in through the front door of the tennis facility burst the EMT crew.
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They cut my shirt off me.
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They put the paddles on me.
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They loaded me onto a gurney and took me to the hospital in an ambulance.
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From there, I was flown to a larger hospital in Pennsylvania.
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They put me on ice overnight.
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Three or four days later, I was told by doctors that I had suffered an episode of sudden cardiac death.
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They don t understand exactly what causes that to happen, but most of the time when it happens, unless you get immediate attention, you die right there on the spot.
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The fact that I made it was attributable to an extraordinarily low odds event.
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It was that before I collapsed on the court, there had been two auto accidents that occurred near the tennis center.
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Ambulances had been dispatched from town, which was five or six miles away.
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Normally it would take 30, 40 minutes to get an ambulance to a site out in the country.
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One of the accidents wasn t serious, and so when the call came in that they had a serious case at the tennis center, the driver of that second ambulance was able to peel off, come to my aid only a few hundred yards from where he was, and except for that immediate attention,
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I would be among the 98% of people who don t survive episodes of cardiac deaths.
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Wow.
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So two other people s terrible luck in that they got into a car accident combined with your terrible luck in that you got something that s 98% fatal, far away from medical attention, combined to create what is, relatively speaking, a piece of good luck for you.
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Exactly.
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Now, my late mother would have said I was destined to survive.
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You know, that s not the way I ve ever thought about things like that.
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I think I was the beneficiary of pure dumb luck.
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But, you know, people have different ways of parsing events like that, and I don t quarrel with anybody s point of view on that.
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I think I was lucky.
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Right.
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Yeah, I would imagine destiny doesn t figure into your calculations as an economist too often.
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Yeah, I think we re low on the destiny scale as a profession.
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Why is the topic important?
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I mean, it seems strange to start a show about luck and success with you almost dying and other people getting into car crashes, but the topic itself is important because
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There s a lot of discussion around luck, both in the political sphere, in the business sphere, in the economic sphere, if you can really separate those things, as well as in our own minds.
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People, we re just kind of bad as humans in estimating what is attributable to luck, what luck even is.
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We re not really sure a lot of the time.
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Why is this something that you ve dedicated time to studying?
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One of the themes in my book is that people tend to overlook the importance of chance events in life.
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I begin the book by describing a number of times when I ve been affected by chance events, and it s not my point to try to suggest that I m more observant than other people, that I notice these things and most people don t.
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It s that
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If you get hit over the head hard enough by luck, you re going to notice it.
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Somebody wins the lottery, we say, that person was really lucky.
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There was a musician, one of the founding members of the Electric Light Orchestra in the UK, driving along a rural road in England, Mike Edwards.
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He had done nothing wrong, apparently.
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A 1,300-pound bale of hay
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broke loose from its moorings on the hillside, started tumbling down, gathered speed, hit a berm, catapulted over a high fence and landed right on the top of the cab of his truck and it killed him instantly.
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I think he was unlucky to have been there at that moment.
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Sounds like it.
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So, we notice vivid examples like that, but when luck plays out as it normally does in life, it s in far more subtle ways and we tend not to notice it s important in those cases.
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We see successful people 30 years into their careers, almost all of them are hardworking and talented.
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There are a few examples to the contrary you can think of.
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lip-syncing boy bands or various others who have succeeded without much hard work or talent.
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But most of the people who make it big really do work hard.
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They really are talented.
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And then it comes time to look back and try to explain to themselves, why did I succeed?
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You know, that s what we do as people.
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We construct narratives about our lives and we do so from the things that are most accessible in memory.
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So if you ve been successful, you ve probably gotten up every day and worked hard.
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You can remember countless examples of doing that, even times when you didn t feel like it, which is when you re most likely to remember examples like that.
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You can remember all the hard problems you solved because you solved so many of them over those years.
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You remember all the formidable opponents that you had to vanquish along your path to the top.
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So, all those things are part of your narrative.
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The teacher who kept you out of trouble when you were in the 11th grade, you ve forgotten about her.
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Maybe you got an early promotion because there was a colleague who was slightly better qualified than you who couldn t accept it.
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because he had to care for an ailing parent.
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So there are just natural tendencies in human cognition to remember the obvious causes of events that we see and to overlook the things that don t happen frequently or as vividly.
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There s a tendency, too, that we tend to focus on headwinds that we face.
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Tom Gilovich, my friend I mentioned earlier, has done research on this specific topic.
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So you re riding a bike into a heavy wind.
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You re conscious of that wind and how it s making life difficult for you every inch of the way.
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The course changes direction.
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Now you ve got the wind at your back.
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You re delighted to have gotten out of that headwind, and you re happy for, what, 20 seconds?
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And then after that, it s no longer in your conscious focus.
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You ve got a wind at your back, but you re not thinking about that because there s nothing you have to do.
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You don t have to work against it.
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And it s the same with events in life.
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If you had to battle against an obstacle, you re hyper-conscious of that.
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You remember it.
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You include it in your story.
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If you had a wind at your back, that s something you just don t notice.
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And so I think in complete innocence,
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Successful people tend to look back on their lives and say, wow, I did it all myself.
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I paid $500 to use one sentence in the beginning of my book.
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It was a line from an E.B.
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White essay originally published in the 1930s.
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It was, luck is not a
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subject you can mention in the presence of self-made men that so seem to capture the difficulty of people comprehending, yes, despite the fact that you were talented and worked hard, you probably had a few breaks along the way.
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Right, we see this in the availability heuristic where it s essentially a cognitive shortcut that causes us to estimate that
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an outcome is based on how readily we can remember something, right?
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So, of course, any successful career track, any successful life course will have hard work, talent, and a little bit of chance or luck.
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And we know we worked hard.
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We know we got into a good school.
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We know we studied 10 hours a day.
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We know we saved money from our first job and reinvested it.
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Into the company and then in my case it would be easy to forget that well yeah also the economy tanked which caused my firm to not want to fire me or lay us off but to pay us for a year even though they couldn t give us any work which became the capital with which to start the art of charm in the first place.
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and also I wasn t born in Zimbabwe and I wasn t born with any major health ailments that impede me from working hard and staying up late and putting in the hours.
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And you re right, people who are self-made, so-called self-made, just hate acknowledging the role of luck in their lives and in their success.
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Why do you think that is?
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You know, you could be cynical about that and say, oh, they re just trying to defend their claim to all the money that s come their way.
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If they would admit for a moment that luck played a role in their success, then others might be more inclined to try to take some of their profits away from them.
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I don t think you need to go there to really understand what s going on.
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I think just as you indicated just now, if you would ask a successful business person, how would things have played out for you if you d been born in Somalia or some other war-torn country, you know, they won t insist, most of them won t, that they would have done just as well.
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They recognize that
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They were lucky not to have been born in those circumstances.
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And it really depends on how you raise the subject in the first place, how people will react to it.
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Do you recall the speeches from the 2012 campaign?
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There was one by the president and one by Elizabeth Warren.
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They were essentially the same speech in substance.
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They were trying to remind people that if they were successful, they hadn t done it entirely on their own.
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They d ship their goods to market on roads the rest of us helped pay for.
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They hired workers that the community helped to educate.
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They ship stuff here and there using networks that were totally built with no assistance from them personally.
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They would, on reflection, agree with that.
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But what people seemed to hear in those speeches, they came to be known as the you didn t build that speeches.
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Right.
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They thought they were being told, oh, you re successful.
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Well, you don t deserve it.
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You have a lofty position.
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You don t really merit that position.
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That wasn t the message of those speeches.
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The speeches were trying to just reinforce the idea that if you succeeded, it wasn t just because of things you had done yourself, that the community had a hand in it too.
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And part of the social contract is to pay forward so that the next group that comes along will have its shot at success.
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That s the problem.
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If you tell people that they were lucky to be in a certain environment, they get angry.
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What I discovered, and this was quite by accident, was that if you take a slightly different tack, if you say, Kent to a successful friend, can you think of any examples of good luck you enjoyed along your path to the top?
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You don t get an angry or defensive reaction if you just ask that question.
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People think about it.
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Their eyes light up when they can think of an example of good luck that they have.
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They want to tell you about it.
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And in the act of telling you about it, that kindles a memory of another example of luck that they enjoyed.
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And then they re telling you about three or four, and then suddenly they re engaged in a conversation about why aren t we making this investment or that investment so that the next group
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can have the same shot I had at becoming a success.
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So it really depends on how you launch the conversation.
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You ve got to be careful not to appear to be saying, oh, you re successful, you don t deserve that, because that s not the message.
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Yeah, it seems like we overestimate our role in the good things that happen to us often enough.
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But what effects does this have on us?
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and on society at large?
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I mean, first and foremost, it seems really obvious that, especially in light of recent political events, that the consequences of bad decisions are very different for people with money and those without money, so that s an obvious effect, right, when we re looking at this, but what else happens when we overestimate our role in the good things that happen to us?
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How does this affect everyone else and ourselves in a negative way?
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Sure, there s a tendency to feel that if you make something with your own hands that it s yours.
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John Locke wrote about this hundreds of years ago.
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Every person has a natural right to the property of his own efforts.
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And so I think when you engage in an activity and the activity succeeds and you earn a lot of money from doing it, there s a natural sense that you re entitled to keep that money.
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In fact, we all live in societies, all societies, at the very least all successful ones, have governments.
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Governments are expensive.
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They do things that we can t do any other way, really, besides through collective action.
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And that s got to be paid for, which means we have to have
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taxes to pay for the things that have to be done collectively.
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And how do we get those taxes?
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They have to be levied on people in a way that they can t volunteer not to pay.
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Why shouldn t taxes be purely voluntary?
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Because no one would pay taxes if they were purely voluntary.
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So the complaint that taxation is theft is really kind of an empty
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rhetorical move.
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I mean, there have to be taxes.
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The only question is whom should we tax, how much, and so on.
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So you don t have a right to the money that comes your way pre-tax.
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What you have a right to is the money
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that comes your way post-tax.
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And how much the tax is, that s a democratically decided question.
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We elect representatives, they deliberate, they decide what the tax rate should be.
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So what you have a legitimate moral claim to is your after-tax income.
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And I think the natural tendency to believe that if you made it, it s yours has really put some huge fortunes under the shadow of a sense of entitlement that the fortunes to keep every cent of by the people who earned them.
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Really, we have to be more open to the idea that what s ours to keep is what we decide as a collective body should be ours to keep after we attend the tasks that we want to do collectively.
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Hey Art of Charm listeners, I m excited to share a new podcast I ve been absolutely binging.
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There s a lot of cool concepts in the book that look like kind of the butterfly effect, right?
1
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When twins might take the SAT on different days, slightly different moods, they get different scores, so they end up with
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a different career path, and all that stuff amplifies over time, and that s just kind of a microcosm of what can happen with luck in different fields with all other things being equal.
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And one of the super interesting points that I d love to hear you speak to is that even when it comes down to talent and work ethic, often the most talented and hardest working people can be undone
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by somebody with a certain amount of luck, and you mention also that, often enough, and usually, in fact, the most successful people are not only talented, and they re not only hardworking, but they are also lucky.
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Yeah, I think we ve seen the role of luck actually get bigger in recent decades, and that s been in part because of new technologies that let the people who are best at what they do serve larger and larger shares of the total market.
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So if you were the best tax accountant at one point in history, you had a claim to the most valuable clients in your town.
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There were two waves of technology that disrupted that industry.
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The first one was H&R Block and other services that demonstrated that you could take high school graduates, essentially, and have them do 90% of the work in filling out people s tax returns.
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You d have a few accountants in the back rooms to answer the hard questions.
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So money that flowed to local accountants began flowing to the organizers of these franchises.
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The next wave came when people wrote software programs that would guide you through the preparation of your own taxes.
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And there were hundreds of those, and there was a real dogfight in the market.
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And finally, critics anointed TurboTax as the most comprehensive, user-friendly version of those.
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And now TurboTax gets the lion s share of all the remuneration that comes in for tax accountants all over the country and increasingly all over the world.
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So if you re the best at what you do, now you get a worldwide reward, what people are willing to pay to have the best worldwide rather than from being the best in your own narrow niche in the local markets.
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And what that sets up is a huge tournament.
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Everybody is trying to be the winner.
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There are thousands, often tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of contestants in these winner-take-all contests.
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There are natural limits on how hard you can work and how smart you can be.
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So there are lots and lots of people bumping up against those natural limits.
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Let s find the contestant out of the many thousands of them who is the smartest, hardest working in the whole set.
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How lucky will he be?
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Well, since we ve chosen him without regard to luck, only because he was the hardest working, most talented, his luck will be neither good nor bad.
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It ll be average on the luck scale.
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There are going to be hundreds of people who are almost as talented, almost as hardworking as he is.
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On average, they ll have average luck too, but there will be a small fraction of them who will have very good luck.
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That s true of any large set of people.
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Some are lucky, some are unlucky.
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And since they ll be so close on the heels of the hardest-working, most talented contestant, the fact that they were much luckier than that contestant
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means that they re going to beat him even if luck counts for only one or two percent of total performance.
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And so it s more and more the case, and we can show this mathematically, it s more and more the case that the most talented contestant will not be the winner of contests like these, and it will almost always be somebody who is almost as talented and hardworking but was a lot luckier.
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So yeah, luck s role has gotten bigger for really two reasons.
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For the reason I just described and because if you win, the amount you get is so much more than what you would get if you don t win.
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So the stakes are higher and the role of luck is also higher.
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it seems like maybe we ignore this in part, not only because of hindsight bias, where we look at our own success 30 years on and say, oh, it was inevitable because of my work ethic and how naturally smart I am, or something like that, but we also see examples of this kind of in the wild, and it s so hard to quantify, and I think that might be one of the reasons that we ignore this.
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We ignore the fact that we might have great parents, or we thank them in our Oscar speech, but we might ignore our country of birth, we ignore our health a lot of the time,
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We ignore the fact that we had tax advice when we were 20 instead of getting it when we were 50, right?
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Even guys like Bill Gates, who are, by pretty much any measure, brilliant, hardworking, talented folks, he happened to go to a school that had unlimited access to computers.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can you speak to that example?
2
SPEAKER_00
I thought that was a really interesting example that I had never even heard before.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Bill Gates, to his real credit, very quick to acknowledge how lucky he was in the circumstances in which he grew up.
2
SPEAKER_01
He was from a well-to-do family in Seattle.
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SPEAKER_01
He went to one of the first high schools ever to offer essentially real-time turnaround on computer programs submitted.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m 10 years older than he is.
2
SPEAKER_01
I remember learning to program in college.
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SPEAKER_01
We had to type out our programs on punch cards.
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SPEAKER_01
We had to walk up a steep hill to turn them into the computer center.
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SPEAKER_01
The very next day, 24 hours later, the program would come back as a printout, identifying syntax errors of various sorts.
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SPEAKER_01
It didn t even run.
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SPEAKER_01
You d try to fix those.
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SPEAKER_01
You d resubmit.
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SPEAKER_01
You d come back up the steep hill the next day.
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SPEAKER_01
Two or three days later, you d have gotten it to run, but before you ever made any real progress, a week would go by.
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SPEAKER_01
Gates could turn in his program and then seconds later get the results and fine-tune it and adjust it and experiment.
2
SPEAKER_01
There were hardly any kids who had access to that before he did.
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SPEAKER_01
And he s quick to acknowledge how important that was in his development.
2
SPEAKER_01
He doesn t write about this that I know of, but others have written about the fact that IBM made a critical error in allowing him to keep the rights to the DAS program that he had purchased for IBM
2
SPEAKER_01
when IBM was launching its first personal computer, if IBM had kept the rights to that program, none of us would have ever heard of Bill Gates.
2
SPEAKER_01
He s very clear that chance events played an enormous role in his life, but they were small things that occurred early on, and all the hard work and the brilliance, those things stand out, but those little moves that occurred and could easily have turned out very different don t come so readily to mind when people look at his career.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, even things like birth order and the family history that you have can fall into place.
2
SPEAKER_00
One of the examples from the book that, I had to read it twice because I just thought, is this even true?
2
SPEAKER_00
If you re born in winter, you tend to be bigger and stronger than your classmates, therefore you can get on more sports teams, you can get more leadership opportunities as a result of that.
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SPEAKER_00
And there s a study that follows these kids through high school
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SPEAKER_00
which of course, if they re taking on leadership positions in high school, they lead to better college applications, which also leads to more leadership opportunities later in life, which lead to higher salaries, which lead to dot dot dot health and lifespan and all the effect that salaries have on that, all because of the month in which you were born.
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SPEAKER_01
You don t imagine that that would matter much.
2
SPEAKER_01
Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this in Hockey Players in his book, Outliers.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you re born in January, February, or March, you re grossly overrepresented in the NHL.
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SPEAKER_01
Many, many more players born in those months than were born in October, November, and December.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s for exactly the reason you cited.
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SPEAKER_01
If you were born in the
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SPEAKER_01
Early months of the year, you re one of the oldest players on your youth league team, and that advantage carries all through high school and into college in the pros.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, CEOs who are born in July and August, the school start dates differ in different parts of the country, but if you re born in the summertime, you re probably among the younger kids in your class.
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SPEAKER_01
CEOs who are born in July and August are way less numerous than would be expected proportionately because they didn t have the opportunities to emerge because of their relative young age as they went through school.
2
SPEAKER_01
Even in economics, there s an interesting finding of this sort.
2
SPEAKER_01
In economics, it s the tradition to list co-authors on a paper alphabetically.
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SPEAKER_01
What the study found was that the top economics department in terms of national rankings, you were more likely to be promoted if your name started with a letter that fell closer to the front of the alphabet.
2
SPEAKER_01
Why?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because you were more likely to be cited at the beginning of the list of authors and hence more noticeable to people and hence you d have a slight leg up in forming a national reputation on the basis of that.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, yeah, these things don t seem like they would matter.
2
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, the contests that we enter unfold over the course of a lifetime.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s like the old tale of the butterfly flapping its wings in China.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s a hurricane in the Caribbean that occurs that wouldn t have occurred except for that butterfly.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly the same thing I ve mentioned with the twins and the SAT scores.
2
SPEAKER_00
One had a cold and the other didn t.
2
SPEAKER_00
And dot, dot, dot.
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SPEAKER_00
One s a doctor and the other one isn t.
3
SPEAKER_00
What about the network effect?
3
SPEAKER_00
How does that exacerbate the effect of luck?
3
SPEAKER_01
The things we do often are more valuable to us if more other people are doing the same things we re doing.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you want to read a book.
3
SPEAKER_01
What book should I read?
3
SPEAKER_01
You could say, I just want to read the best book and that s all I care about.
3
SPEAKER_01
But another thing you probably care about in addition to reading the best book is to have
3
SPEAKER_01
an opportunity to discuss the book you read with other people.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you can t do that if you read a book that no one else reads.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so if you have two books of equal quality, you re going to get the same benefit from reading one as the other.
3
SPEAKER_01
unless one has a stronger readership, if one s on the bestseller list and the other one isn t, then in addition to getting the same enjoyment you would have from reading the other book, you re going to also enjoy more opportunities to discuss that book with friends who will have read it as well.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, when that s true, the saying, success breeds success, holds with a vengeance.
3
SPEAKER_01
Duncan Watts did a great experiment.
3
SPEAKER_01
He had a website called Music Lab.
3
SPEAKER_01
Duncan Watts is a sociologist, a researcher who works at Microsoft.
3
SPEAKER_01
Music Lab had 40 indie bands listed on it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Each with one of their songs.
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SPEAKER_01
You probably have never heard of any of these bands.
3
SPEAKER_01
I hadn t.
3
SPEAKER_01
The songs were free to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
You could download any one you want on the condition that you give it a rating.
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SPEAKER_01
And so
3
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People downloaded them, they gave them their ratings, and that was the basis for objective quality rankings of the songs 1 through 48.
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SPEAKER_01
Then he set up eight separate websites that were just like the first one.
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SPEAKER_01
Different people went to each of the eight.
3
SPEAKER_01
What they saw was the same 40 indie bands, 48 indie bands and songs to go one with each.
3
SPEAKER_01
But in addition to that, they saw how many times each song had been downloaded and the rating it had gotten so far from people.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they focused on one particular song.
3
SPEAKER_01
The pattern was that some songs most people did like, other songs most people hated.
3
SPEAKER_01
Those were the minority, both those categories.
3
SPEAKER_01
The majority of songs had mix ratings.
3
SPEAKER_01
Some people liked them, others didn t.
3
SPEAKER_01
One song with medium rankings, it was ranked 26 out of the 48.
3
SPEAKER_01
In one of the websites, one of the eight, it ranked number one.
3
SPEAKER_01
In another one, it ranked number 40.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it was either a great song, according to people who listened to it and evaluated it, in one environment.
3
SPEAKER_01
In another environment, it stunk.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what s going on there?
3
SPEAKER_01
Apparently, if the first person who downloads your song and rates it happened to like it, remember these are songs that some people like, others don t, then that creates a halo effect that makes the song more popular each and every time somebody else gives it a rating.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the songs, we know how good they are objectively, at least from that operational measure he constructed, but how well they do depends in part on pure chance.
3
SPEAKER_01
Did somebody who liked your song happen to listen to it first?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, good for you.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re going to do well.
3
SPEAKER_01
If somebody who hated your song listened to it first, you re going to fall off in the other direction.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s a lot of room for social dynamics and networks in all these processes.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re mostly things that we don t notice.
3
SPEAKER_01
We usually say that the good songs win, the bad songs lose.
3
SPEAKER_01
And certainly quality matters, but it s not all that matters.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s so funny how things like this, the butterfly effect, network effects, we see this with VHS versus Betamax, Windows versus Apple, and things like that, and it s a little depressing, right, in some ways, because what are our options?
3
SPEAKER_00
If we can t focus on luck, because we know we gotta focus only on what we can control, now what?
3
SPEAKER_00
We gotta have a mixture of talent and hard work, is there more to the story?
3
SPEAKER_00
What do we lean on?
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, students ask me, what should I do?
3
SPEAKER_01
I wanna succeed.
3
SPEAKER_01
What I tell them is to try to think of an activity that you ve engaged in that caused you to lose all sense of the passage of time.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is a psychological state that the psychologists call flow.
3
SPEAKER_01
And some people have never experienced that state, but most people have on some occasions or others.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I say, try to find a job that will let you engage in that activity for a substantial portion of your time.
3
SPEAKER_01
It may not be a job that pays well, or maybe it is one that pays well.
3
SPEAKER_01
Forget about that.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you get a job like that, you re going to become an expert at whatever you do.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because you love to do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re going to be engaged fully in the process of doing it.
3
SPEAKER_01
To become an expert is really, really hard, but it s the most important thing to do if you want to have a chance to succeed.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you re not really good at something, probably you won t succeed.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s the way the competitive environment has
3
SPEAKER_01
evolved as you well know.
3
SPEAKER_01
So if you find a job that you love, if you find something that really does engage you so fully that you lose any sense of the passage of time, it s going to be a lot easier for you to become an expert.
3
SPEAKER_01
So those are things you can control.
3
SPEAKER_01
Whether you get a break, whether events unfold in your favor or not, maybe you can t control that.
3
SPEAKER_01
But
3
SPEAKER_01
At the very least, you re going to end up working at a task that makes your day go by in a very pleasant way.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s not such a bad outcome.
3
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, focus on what you can control.
3
SPEAKER_01
I agree.
3
SPEAKER_01
As a society, there s a great deal that we can control.
3
SPEAKER_01
I say that the most important ingredient for success is to be born of the right parents at the right time in the right place.
3
SPEAKER_01
Being born in Somalia, not good.
3
SPEAKER_01
Being born in the United States at a certain point in our history, the best possible thing that could happen to you.
3
SPEAKER_01
What the environment is like, we can control even though I can t control it and you can t.
3
SPEAKER_01
We need to make investments to create opportunities for people to succeed.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think if we recognize that the environment plays a big role in explaining why people are able to succeed in the first place, then I think we re more inclined to want to make those investments.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nobody wants their kids and grandkids to grow up in a country that increasingly resembles a backward land that doesn t provide opportunities and good ladders for people to climb into what their full potential holds for them.
3
SPEAKER_00
Sure, and no offense to the AOC Brazilian listeners, but we look at countries like Brazil with massive inequality and lots and lots and lots of corruption and you think, wow, okay, is that the direction that we want to head even if I end up a billionaire?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is it worth it?
3
SPEAKER_00
Do I want to drive my...
3
SPEAKER_00
Bugatti on a road that s full of potholes and can t stop because I m gonna get shot at?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I don t think so.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m not saying Brazil s like that everywhere, of course, but we see things like that in countries with great inequality.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you re listening to this show right now on your smartphone that you bought with your credit card here in a Western country, and you re thinking, gee, I just can t catch a break, the truth is you ve caught many breaks, possibly by birthright, just to find yourself where you are right now.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I think the pity is that we haven t really been willing to make the investments that are needed to maintain that advantage for our citizens.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, when I graduated from college, I went to Georgia Tech.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a state-supported school.
3
SPEAKER_01
There was very heavy support from taxpayer dollars for students who went there.
3
SPEAKER_01
I graduated with a very good education and zero debt.
3
SPEAKER_01
No debt at all.
3
SPEAKER_01
If I graduated from college today, coming from the family I came from, I d have $40,000 in debt, maybe more than that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I d be starting my
3
SPEAKER_01
career with the miracle of compound interest working against me rather than for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a huge difference.
3
SPEAKER_01
The smart kids in math, if they come from a low-income household, they re less likely to graduate from college in the U.S.
3
SPEAKER_01
now.
3
SPEAKER_01
The dumb kids in math were born into more wealthy households.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s not
3
SPEAKER_01
A situation that anybody is willing to say publicly is the way things ought to be.
3
SPEAKER_01
We ought to be having people succeed or not based on how hard they work and what talents they bring to the table, not based on, you know, whether they happen to be born with money in the family.
3
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think the example of Bhutan, the guy that you d met in Nepal when you re in the Peace Corps, was that your story?
3
SPEAKER_01
I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal for two years.
3
SPEAKER_01
I had a cook.
3
SPEAKER_01
His name was Birkman Rai.
3
SPEAKER_01
He was a Bhutanese hill tribesman.
3
SPEAKER_01
He is probably to this day the smartest, most industrious guy I ve ever come in contact with personally.
3
SPEAKER_01
There was nothing he couldn t do.
3
SPEAKER_01
He learned so quickly and was so proficient.
3
SPEAKER_01
But
3
SPEAKER_01
Probably the apex of his lifetime s earnings trajectory was the pittance I was able to pay him out of my Peace Corps stipend.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, there just weren t opportunities for him to go anywhere.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s insane to see the difference.
3
SPEAKER_01
He would have been a wealthy guy here, probably.
3
SPEAKER_01
or at least successful to a reasonable degree.
3
SPEAKER_01
But there, there were no options.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, Napoleon said, ability is nothing without opportunity.
3
SPEAKER_01
You need to have a field to plant the seed.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can t just have a seed with no place to grow.
4
SPEAKER_00
So knowing that the most successful people in any field are almost always lucky, not just talented, not just hardworking, is then our end game here, our strategy to get more chances to play to increase frequency and therefore probability and therefore our chance to get lucky?
4
SPEAKER_00
I m trying to turn this into a teachable moment here for the audience so that we can find out
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, we know that it involves this.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is good because it means that I stand a fighting chance if I m not the most talented, but also it means that even if I am hardworking and talented, I need to rely on luck.
4
SPEAKER_00
How do I increase my luck?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think there s literature now on the psychological trait of resilience.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you fail or get dealt a bad hand, are you able to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back in the game?
4
SPEAKER_01
That s an important trait.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think for the reasons you just suggested, if you re trying to draw a
4
SPEAKER_01
white ball out of an urn that s got only one white ball and lots and lots of black balls in it, then the more times you draw, the better your chances will be of drawing that white ball.
4
SPEAKER_01
So sure, if you re persistent, if you keep attacking the goal again and again, you re much more likely to succeed.
4
SPEAKER_01
But we know that there are people who have that quality, who are talented, and they try many times, and yet they don t succeed.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not sufficient.
4
SPEAKER_01
But you re much more likely to succeed if you take that attitude toward your life.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the really key step is to get unusually good at something.
4
SPEAKER_01
In a winner-take-all economy, it s the people who are best at what they do who are going to get the biggest rewards.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you re not going to get to be the best at what you do unless you find something that you really love doing, because otherwise it s going to be just too difficult to stick with it and put in the necessary effort to do that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right, and the effort is what leads to sort of the time in grade, and the time in grade is what essentially is us constantly drawing, trying to get the black ball out of the pot, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Constantly playing the game.
4
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
I couldn t put it any better.
4
SPEAKER_00
Perfect, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
concepts that I also thought was quite interesting that I had never thought about was how the idea of bad luck actually serves us because we don t view negative outcomes as inevitable because of the luck factor, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
We don t look at our situation and go, I m totally screwed, I can never do this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, at least successful people and people with growth mindsets rarely do because we think, well, there s always the chance I m gonna get lucky and it turns out a lot of those people are right.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s a very robust finding by psychologists.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s that when we succeed, we attribute our success to hard work and ability.
4
SPEAKER_01
When we fail, we attribute our failure to bad luck.
4
SPEAKER_01
Some authors have suggested that that asymmetry may be perversely adaptive.
4
SPEAKER_01
So if you think about it, you ve succeeded and you attribute that to your skill and effort.
4
SPEAKER_01
Those are persistent qualities in a person.
4
SPEAKER_01
So if another opportunity comes along, should I take it?
4
SPEAKER_01
Should I venture into this new possibility?
4
SPEAKER_01
If what it takes to succeed or skill and effort, and I ve succeeded in the past, and I say it s because I have those qualities, well, I ve still got those qualities.
4
SPEAKER_01
So sure, I should accept this new challenge.
4
SPEAKER_01
What if you fail?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, if you say it s because I was unlucky that I failed, now a new opportunity comes along.
4
SPEAKER_01
Should I take it?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I was unlucky the last time.
4
SPEAKER_01
By its very nature, bad luck won t happen every time.
4
SPEAKER_01
So why shouldn t I take it?
4
SPEAKER_01
I m not going to be unlucky forever.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ll keep taking it until my luck changes.
4
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, it s not always adaptive to believe things that are strictly true.
4
SPEAKER_01
sometimes believing things that are not quite good descriptions of the way the world really is may help you overcome certain other psychological tendencies that would be destructive to you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so it s a complex world that we live in.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah this is very very interesting because we can harness this and make it useful for us.
4
SPEAKER_00
Not just highlight the role of luck and success but also look at it from both the right side up angle and I put that right side up in air quotes I guess here because we re looking at a double ended problem where
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, it is tough to realize.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a jagged pill to swallow that you might be super hardworking, super talented, and somebody might get the jump on you because they were in the right places at the right time.
4
SPEAKER_00
However, we can also maximize our opportunity to be in those places at the right time by making sure that we are developing skills, we are developing grit, we re developing persistence, we re developing resilience.
4
SPEAKER_00
all of the concepts that we teach here at the Art of Charm on this show so often, and then utilize that to play the game so many times that we just constantly seem to be getting lucky, and it kind of goes back to that, is that an Edison quote?
4
SPEAKER_00
The harder I work, the luckier I get?
4
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it s more like the harder I work, the more frequently I experience the effects of luck, which doesn t quite have as much of a ring to it, so I see why he phrased it the other way.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sure, sure, yeah, there are all sorts of sayings in the popular culture that encourage us to sort of set the view that luck matters to one side and believe, contrary to reality perhaps, that it s really just about hard work and talent.
4
SPEAKER_00
Why is it important to highlight the role of luck in success?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, we have the illusion of control where we think we re responsible for more than we are because, you know, we often don t see things that we can t control or had nothing to do with in the first place, but
4
SPEAKER_00
There s some research that shows that when we re reminded of luck s importance, we change our behavior.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a very fascinating stream of research.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ll describe one experiment that my research assistant, Selena Huo, came up with on her own.
4
SPEAKER_01
It sort of captures the general idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
She asked a group of volunteer subjects to think of a good thing that had happened to them recently.
4
SPEAKER_01
One group, she said, name three things you did that caused that good thing to happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
A second group, she asked to name three things that were external to you, things you didn t do, maybe things in the environment that happened that were instrumental in causing this good thing to happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then a control group, she just said, name a good thing that happened to you.
4
SPEAKER_01
At the end, she gave them a bonus.
4
SPEAKER_01
They knew they were going to get a bonus for completing the survey.
4
SPEAKER_01
She gave them the opportunity to give some or all or any part of their bonus to one of three charities, their pick.
4
SPEAKER_01
The group that was asked to think of things they personally had done gave about 25% less to charity than the group that was asked to think of three external things that had caused the good thing to happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the control group landed roughly in the middle between those two.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s consistent, that experiment and its findings are consistent with
4
SPEAKER_01
a very broad literature that induces subjects to experience the emotion of gratitude.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a common human emotion.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you get somebody to experience that emotion, a whole cascade of things happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
They get happier by the usual measures.
4
SPEAKER_01
They get healthier by various objective measures.
4
SPEAKER_01
They get along better with other people.
4
SPEAKER_01
Other people are more likely to like them or think highly of them.
4
SPEAKER_01
and they become more willing to contribute to the common good.
4
SPEAKER_01
All those things happen just from manipulating people into a situation where they re likely to experience the emotion of gratitude.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s interesting to read about the manipulations they use to induce that emotion.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe
4
SPEAKER_01
They ll put you in a spot to do a task, the computer crashes, and then somebody comes along and says, oh, don t worry that you just spent an hour doing that and you lost all your data.
4
SPEAKER_01
That happened to me too last week.
4
SPEAKER_01
I know how to fix that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he pushes a few buttons and the computer miraculously recovers all the lost data.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we know that subject who was helped in that way experiences gratitude.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there are a whole host of manipulations like that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they just have consistently this
4
SPEAKER_01
interesting panoply of effects.
4
SPEAKER_01
No bad things happen when you experience gratitude.
4
SPEAKER_01
Only good things happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so if other people like you better, well, we all know that humility within reasonable limits is an attractive psychological trait.
4
SPEAKER_01
If other people like you better,
4
SPEAKER_01
Aren t you more likely to get ahead?
4
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How do you succeed in this economy?
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It s by being a member of a high-functioning team.
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Well, everybody wants to be on a team like that.
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Teams like that don t need just anybody to join them.
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They can be picky.
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If you claim credit for everything good that s happened to you, you re almost certainly claiming more credit than you re entitled to.
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Who wants a jerk like that on their team?
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Lighten up.
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Be grateful.
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Savor your good fortune.
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You ll be better off in every measurable way if you do that.
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Yes, it seems like gratitude, luck, looking at the role of luck in our lives, and not focusing, of course, how it can cause us problems, but focusing on our ability to not only create more of it, play the game more, but focusing on everything that we can control in order to maximize our chances of getting lucky.
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It s almost like saying maximize our luck in terms of getting lucky.
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It s an interesting set of data, and it s an interesting discussion, and thank you so much for coming by and doing this with us.
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It s been a total pleasure for me to do it.
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well, you know, some people, some guys have all the luck.
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It s the ways of making the luck, using the concepts taught at AOC Bootcamp, using the concepts taught on the show here, grit, resilience, persistence, networking, relationships, things like that.
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Great big thank you to Robert H. Frank.
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The book title is Success and Luck, Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.
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We ll have that linked up in the show notes as well.
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank him on Twitter.
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We ll also link that in the show notes.
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Remember, if you re on your phone listening to this, you can tap the screen, the show notes should pop right up.
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I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm, and it s a great way to get a hold of me, Jason, and engage with us there.
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I also post a lot of things that aren t shared on the show.
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Our boot camps that I mentioned earlier on the show, those live programs down here in LA, that s at bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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The live program is by far and away my favorite part of running AOC, taking the concepts we discuss on the show,
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plugging them into your head and drilling you till you re blue in the face.
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It s more fun than it sounds.
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And remember, we re sold out a few months in advance.
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So if you re thinking about it a little bit, you should get in touch ASAP.
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Get some info from us so you can plan ahead.
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I also want to encourage you to join the AOC challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge.
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Or if you re in the States, you can text the word charmed, C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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That challenge is about networking.
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It s about connection skills.
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It s about relationships.
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personal and professional.
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We ll also send you that fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show, and I do videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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The idea here is to make you a better networker, a better connector, a better thinker, maybe a little bit more lucky now that I think about it.
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I don t know.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or text charmed in the U.S.
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to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of AOC was produced, as always, by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor, and the show notes on the website are by Robert Fogarty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, please, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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And go get lucky, right?
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That was the point of the show.