If you want to get luckier in life, realize that success is mostly luck. I live by the mantra, “Never fail due to a lack of effort because hard work requires no skill.”
It's a reminder to STOP making excuses when something seems too daunting to tackle. There've been too many instances when I didn't start something because I felt I lacked the skills necessary to succeed. I've regretted each non-action.
For example, I postponed starting Financial Samurai until 2009, three years after first contemplating the idea. I didn't know whether or not I could write anything insightful. In addition, I also didn't know how to start a website, despite the easy availability of free instruction. The delay cost me over a million bucks.
For those of you who want more luck, I strongly believe the more you attribute any success you have to luck and mean it, the more luck will come your way. Why? Because you won't take your luck for granted. Gratitude is what will keep propelling you forward. Let me explain by strolling down luck lane.
Related: Conventional Wisdom Leaves Much To Luck In Investing
First, A Reminder About Luck
Here's the latest reminder to keep the ego in check from a comment left in the post, The Downside Of Financial Independence. I ended the post with the importance of working hard to not dishonor the generations before us who laid the foundation.
On generational wealth, I think people, and successful people especially attribute much of their success to hard work. The fact is, random chance plays much more of a part than we would like to admit. If our grandfather worked 18 hours per day to earn his fortune, there are likely 10 other grandfathers who worked the same 18 hours per day but never became wealthy.
I am moderately successful and sure I work hard. But so do most people. I am successful because early in my career, a hiring manager decided to take a chance on a smart ass kid. Had that not happened, my trajectory would be completely different (for better or worse).
In other words, all our ancestors emigrated at some point. All had to work hard to get ahead. Some got farther than others. Therefore, my great grandparents were simply luckier than others to establish homes and raise families in Taiwan and Hawaii, respectively.
The instant you start telling yourself that most of your success is due to hard work is the instant you start losing your lucky momentum. Your wealth is mostly due to luck. It's important to recognize some of your life's luckiest moments in order to rid yourself of attributing success to hard work. Only with humility will you be able to generate more luck in the future.
Three Lucky Breaks
Here are three lucky breaks that have really shaped my life.
Fell In Love Thanks To Luck
1) Meeting my wife in college. Life is easier with a life partner. But some folks don't find their soulmate until later in life. Some never find someone at all. I was extremely lucky to meet my wife when I was a senior in college. It was unexpected because I was 100% focused on getting a job. She wasn't on my radar junior year because she was still in high school then.
As my focus was to free up time for job interviews, I took fluffier courses like Advanced Golf and Japanese 101. Hooray for a Liberal Arts education that taught me how to build relationships over four hours on a golf course with important people! Even better was Japanese 101 because that's where I met my wife.
My original purpose for learning Japanese was to become proficient enough to charm female tourists while back home in Hawaii. I also thought I'd be able to get an easy A just chilling in the back row. Instead, Japanese 101 was the first course I ever got a D on a test! It was a beautiful D, however, because my future wife offered to help me with my studies.
Meeting my wife at William & Mary was 100% luck! She could have very easily decided to attend UVA in Charlottesville where her mom worked. Luckily for me, she chose William & Mary instead because she wanted a more intimate classroom setting. UVA's 20,000+ student population at the time was 5X larger than William & Mary's. Further, we couldn't have met at UVA because I was only wait-listed. So in a very large way, I owe William & Mary a massive debt of gratitude for taking a chance on me.
My future wife was the one who called me at 5:30am to make sure I'd get to my 8am interview on time back in 1998. She was the one who consoled me after each job rejection. When I moved to San Francisco in June 2001, she decided to graduate six months early to join me that December since I hardly knew anyone. In late 2014, she negotiated her own severance package to keep me company during early retirement. Now she's the COO and CFO of our little lifestyle business.
Having a best friend to experience the majority of your life with is truly lucky.
Got Lucky With My Job Search
2) Getting a job offer from a major investment bank in 1999. I began interviewing with Goldman starting in 1998 at a finance career job fair in Washington DC. It was a pretty cutthroat environment with a lot of go-getters from some pretty good schools like Georgetown and Duke. One female recruiter from Merrill Lynch even looked down on me for wearing a teddy bear tie holding a balloon that my girlfriend gave me. Thanks a lot you cold-hearted wench!
Seven round trips from school to NYC, 55 interviews, and two weeks after graduating from The College of William & Mary in May 1999 later, I finally got an email offering me a job. It was so very exciting.
It would be easy to attribute my getting a job at a major investment bank to my interviewing skills and perseverance. But the fact is, if I had interviewed better, I might have gotten the job offer much quicker! When I spoke with my incoming colleagues, I learned that the average number of interviews they'd had was about 15. In other words, having undergone 3.5X more interviews, clearly I was lucky to get through the gauntlet.
Further, no one else from William & Mary got a job offer from GS that year. Nor did anybody get a job offer from GS the year prior. The only reason I was given the opportunity to interview was due to a GS recruiter named Kim Purkiss who selected my resume at the career fair. She fought for me during the recruiting process, and I owe so much to her.
If I didn't get a job at GS, I wouldn't have bought VCSY in early 2000, the multi-bagger stock that grew from $3,000 – $150,000 in six short months. Without VCSY, I wouldn't have felt comfortable buying a $580,500, 2/2 condo in Pacific Heights a couple years later that has now doubled in value and commands $4,200/month in rent with no mortgage.
Without working in finance for 13 years, I wouldn't be able to write about investing, real estate, and retirement with ease. And without Financial Samurai, I'm not sure whether I would've left my job in 2012 because I wouldn't have known what to do with myself.
A Lucky Encounter For Financial Samurai
3) Financial Samurai to 1 million organic pageviews a month. Starting a website is easy. Growing a website is the fun and hard part. I do believe most people who publish 2 – 4X a week without fail for three years will be able to generate a livable income stream online e.g. $2,000 – $5,000/month. However, only a lucky few can get to 1 million organic pageviews a month without any advertising, a forum, or public self-promotion.
My lucky break came in 2010 when The LA Times money columnist, Kathy Kristof highlighted my post, Get An Umbrella Policy, Your Teenager Is Going To Bankrupt You.
It was just an average post, but it was relevant to Kathy. I met up with Kathy at a conference in 2016. And she said at the time, she had a teenage son who she always worried about. Therefore, the post really resonated with her when she was perusing personal finance blogs to highlight. Talk about 100% luck!
Once The LA Times featured Financial Samurai, other large media organizations began following suit. The more large media organizations highlight your work, the more credibility and traffic you get. Now the badge of honor is jam packed with media mentions eight years later.
Related: Conventional Wisdom Leaves Much To Luck In Investing
More Lucky Breaks With Blogging
One of the more recent lucky breaks was when social media got hold of Scraping By On $500,000 A Year. That came out of nowhere because I wrote the post in 2015. Because that post was viewed several million times, it provided a shift up in traffic that I'm still experiencing months later.
Even more recently, Yahoo decided to highlight The Dark Side Of Early Retirement on its homepage. How cool is that? For website owners, this is kind of like winning the lottery. Companies literally spend tens of thousands of dollars a month with PR companies to try to get this type of exposure.
And here I was getting it for free without having to pimp myself. It's complete luck to get featured and have my writing stand on its own! From this feature, traffic doubled for several days, bringing in new readers along the way.
So how did this lucky break occur? Erin, a deputy managing editor randomly reached out and asked if she could republish the post and I told her, “Of course! Take everything and my little pony too!”
Perhaps she reached out because she noticed the Scraping By On $500K post from the month prior since the post talked about a New York City couple and the editor currently lives in NYC as well. Who knows! But I didn't ask because I didn't want to annoy her.
There are far better writers with much longer writing careers who've never gotten featured on the front page of Yahoo. I'm definitely not as deserving as many other people.
Don't Take Your Luck For Granted
I used to believe success was around 50% luck / 50% hard work. How can hard work not be a big part of the equation when you first start out? Now I believe success is closer to 80% luck / 20% hard work the farther you pull away from the median.
We can't control the 80%, but we can control the 20% so we might as well try. To take my luck for granted would be to dishonor the millions of other people out there who are not as lucky.
The longer you work at your craft, the luckier you'll get. You just have to be patient, like the fisherman who sets up his station every morning without fail, hoping to reel in the catch of a lifetime.
Finally, I do believe in karma. The more we can do to help other people, the luckier we'll get. I wish each and every one of you the best of luck. And when you get a fortuitous break, don't forget to share!
Loading ...For more resources check out my:
- Top financial products page to find the best products for your finances
- Invest in real estate page to invest in my favorite asset class,
- Free wealth management page to manage your money better.
Financial Samurai has been online since 2009 and is one of the most trusted and largest independently-run personal finances today.
Related: Grow Stronger By Humbling Yourself Each Year
Readers, what kind of lucky breaks have you had in your life? What are some of the things you've incorrectly attributed to hard work that in reality were mostly due to luck?
But none of your examples were about luck. It’s great that you met your wife, but there are thousands, if not millions of other people in the world who would also be perfect matches for you. You could have met several of them if you hadn’t met your wife. Or you could be perfectly happy single!
Also getting a job after several interviews is a prime example of how it’s not luck that lands you the job. If it had been luck, that would mean that the recruiter threw a bunch of resumes in the air and randomly picked yours. But even then you would have had to make all the work to even end up in the situation where you can send a resume to them. 55 interviews means that they definitely weren’t gambling.
Thousands, I’d not millions of life partners! I highly doubt it.
A lot of people think they are lucky, and then get divorced too.
Finding someone way early in life is super lucky. Just like having health kids early in life and doing OK is super lucky. Can’t take this luck for granted.
Here are more examples of wealth and luck.
Doesn’t entirely sound like luck. There is a lot of grit and passion that goes into success. Sam, you are successful because you are determined. You have a unique gift of inspiring people to get out of their financial handcuffs. Sure, there is some luck, but that luck tends to happen after several years of consistent hard work. Your success is well deserved.
Great topic, Sam! I’ve been obsessed with luck for the past year. I certainly believe you can improve your luck. As your experience highlights, lucky people just do more things. We ask, “Is it better to be good or lucky?” I say it’s better to be good at being lucky. If you didn’t attend that career fair, you would have missed out on the luck at GS. If you didn’t decide to blog, you would’ve missed out on that feature in the LA Times. But we’re also lucky that you share your insight with us and help us improve our financial lives!
If anyone is interested, my whole post and thoughts on improving your luck can be found here in the URL field.
Most of us can expect to have a non-zero number of potentially life-changing opportunities in our lifetimes.
For many of us, these opportunities can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Some will have considerably more opportunities.
My one best suggestion is to always be prepared to take full advantage of these rare opportunities when they present themselves.
Clearly luck does play a role in success. Often say, I was lucky to join a company that grew 25x with stock options that were widely distributed. One of my earliest managers was tough with the purpose to foster resilience and I was lucky he hired me. And while I tend to be risk adverse, more opportunities emerged. And the best luck, a good family .
The first quote you live by.
It’s beautiful Sam.
Thank you.
I have an interesting story about luck and hard work. I run a website that net around a million dollars a year for the last 10 years. The only reason that I even started the website was because my brother was bitching to me one day 10 years ago about a website that ripped him off. After looking at the site and deciding that I can build a better site, 10 years later I am retired in my early 30s. However, prior to that I had spent ten years in affiliate marketing which gave me the experience and knowledge that I needed to build and market this site. So from my experience it’s been 50/50.
I often look back and think about how things could have turned out differently if it wasn’t for that one event.
Very cool that you took action. What’s the website and how long would it take to get to the million dollars a year mark?
I believe in “odds” and not fate and that is how I try to live my life on a daily basis. By putting the odds in my favor each day, I am putting myself in a better position to get “lucky”, whatever that really means. By working hard and learning everyday, Im increasing my odds at career and financial success. Exercising everyday increases my odds of living a healthy life. Frequently networking with others increases my odds of building valuable business relationships. By constantly working to put the odds in my favor, I won’t consider success to be luck, just a result of many small steps to get there.
I think success is as a result of luck, hard work and relationships. I work in the music industry and many of my jobs and promotions have been secured through relationships – family and friendship ties alongside aggressive networking and working to maintain an excellent reputation across the industry. Relationships can give you great opportunities, even in the most difficult of times and when all else seems lost… What you do today to be supportive, helpful and fair to your colleagues and clients will nearly always come back to you in years to come in the way of referrals and recommendations
VCSY…a stock so near and dear to me as that was my lucky break as well. Let me know if you ever want to know the backstory to that company!
I do! All I know is that they’re in the time it had a keypad as it’s homepage and we all had hopes that it would be the next grade Chinese Internet stock. Then it went crazy because we were sharing the idea with each other on all the trading desk across the street. Then I saw one of the founders cash offer 1 million bucks.
Vcsy came about as a reverse merger with a shell company. The original business was an inventory management system for pawn shops. That entity didn’t survive and the stock traded down to a fraction of a penny and basically became another shell. That’s when the current company did the same type of reverse merger during the height of the dot com craziness and started running because of the reasons you said. I didn’t realize your part in that!!
That is so wild. So incredibly wild. I think that stock pick was probably the only truly lucky thing in your post. You could have held it or bought a different wild company at the time.
Luck is definitely a part of success, sometimes it’s the only part that matters. There are types of luck though, and often we don’t recognize luck when we find it.
As, for me I was orphaned at 16. I had some lucky advantages though – I grew up in Marin County, son of a lawyer and banker. My parents didn’t leave me much.
I quit college to take a job at a video game company that went on to be outrageously successful.
I was “lucky” but I knew when I took the job that the place was going to be successful. There was luck there, but I also worked my ass off.
Thinking of luck, I’m always reminded of the Heinlein quote, “Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet you can’t win.”
I try as hard as I can, but I believe luck and destiny plays an important part in my life.
The thing is I don’t know what luck has in plan for me, so I had to plan ahead for myself and prepare for the worst. If good things happen instead, then it’s perfect! if not, I already have a plan to fall back on.
I guess I like to the change the word luck to ” opportunity,” then this whole thing will make more sense to me at least.
As a woman had I been born two generations ago, I simply did not have the opportunities that I have today. Having a good education, a good job, freedom to live my life the way I want (including backpacking all over the world) was just not an option for both my grandmothers!!! But sure I had to work hard to get where I am, not everybody got into the school that I went and got a job where I got and works over 60 hours per week, or dares to backpack around the world..( Just got back from Patagonia).
On the downside I know of countless people who had all the opportunities in the world and blew through it. I have a friend who comes from old money, and has a cousin who has been in and out of prison for drug possession way too many times that I can recall. I went to school with him, very smart kid with a trust fund that unfortunately took away all his motivation for doing something with his life. My friend on the other hand, took the opportunity (trust fund)and now works mainly as a pro bono attorney for battered and abused women.
As you like to put it, at the end of the day everything is rational. You can only play with the hand that you were given, so you make the best of it.
My hand did not include being born in a refugee camp in Darfur, but at the same time it did not include a trust fund. I am obviously humbled by the opportunities that I have had in life and will try to work hard to recognizing more opportunities that life will bring my way, but at the same time won’t fret over what I can’t have and learn to accept and let go when things are not meant to be :)
Very well said. My mother’s favorite class was physics. She would have liked to pursue a career as a physicist, but those jobs weren’t really open to women even one generation ago. I’m thankful that my “sisters” from a previous generation paved the way so women like myself can have careers in science and other areas.
Hi Sam,
I don’t find you particularly lucky at all. I do find you successful, humble, and grateful, but not lucky.
No matter how great you think your wife is I think mine is better! If you were truly lucky you would have met my wife first.
Second, there are over 6 million people in the financial service industry. In my eyes the guys who only had to work 40 hours a week to achieve the same level of financial success you achieved by working 80 are way luckier than you. what about the guys who only worked 20 hours a week or 10 to achieve the same result. Are they luckier than you?
Hitting a ten bagger, yeah maybe a little luck but in a previous post you wrote about your thought process before you bought the stock. During those time with the market the way it was your thesis was one of the more sound ones I heard.
Reaching a million page views on FinancialSamurai is definitely not lucky!! The content is some of the best on the web. I actually think you’re unlucky Bloomberg or Forbes hasn’t bought you out for big bucks.
We should all feel fortunate to live in such a great company. Most of us should be eternally grateful for who and what we have in our life. But Lucky?
Luck is when you accidentally miss your flight and the plane goes down.
Thanks, Bill
Haha nice one about your wife. I guess we’ll never know will we.
Luck is definitely relative based on your examples you gave on work and the number of hours.
1 million page views a month is definitely mostly lucky. Try talking to the entire web industry on sites that can gain this level of traffic with no advertising or publicity. Most of the traffic is from search engines, and search engines really cannot be gamed over the long run.
hey Sam, when the 2008-9 financial collapse happened did you sell everything or just ride it out?
You mentioned that it was the catalyst for starting this site and you lost 30% ~ but don’t say if that was a paper loss or real.
Lots of people bailed and lost but those who held on saw a huge bull market.
You could say it’s luck that you didn’t invest with Bernie Madoff and got scammed. those are the stories that tick me off. corporate fraud is the worst.
I just rode it out and started investing more in 2010 when I survived about 20 rounds of layoffs.
A lot of my investments were liquid, so I couldn’t get out. For example, my vacation property in Lake Tahoe, my private equity investment in bulldog gin, in my private real estate investment in real estate assets all over the world with a seven year vesting period.
Thankfully everything turned out OK. But things could’ve easily turned out bad.
How about you? It is crazy to invest in the biggest bull market of all time.
https://www.financialsamurai.com/long-term-investing-is-all-about-saving-yourself-from-yourself/
https://www.financialsamurai.com/just-say-no-to-angel-investing/
Luckily (or not) I didn’t have that much invested so I didn’t panic sell…but I should have poured money into the market the few years after. Wasn’t until 2013 that I thought I better get on this bull train! I’m mostly in S&P 500 indexes and some tech stocks (Amazon, Google…) At least I’ve doubled my $ since then, also as I am in Canada I’ve done well with the US dollar rising. That alone is a 30% plus gain in the past few years.
if you look long term, 20-30 year period then things will always rebound. Some of the other financial blogs advocate 90-100% stock portfolios if you are young and looking for aggressive growth. Once you have your nest egg and want less volatility then you go bonds, fixed income…
Why do you say it’s crazy to invest in this bull market, you are fearing a big correction soon? If Trump messes up then it could happen.
Joe, how old are you? A lot of rest depends on age and where you are on your financial journey. I don’t think it’s crazy to invest in stocks at all. But I do think it is not wise to invest most of your net worth in the stock market if you are already retired or are close to retiring.
I’m late 30’s but like many young people I didn’t give much thought into saving in my 20’s. I only started paying attention to finances the past few years. Like most I figured I would work until 60-65. I had no idea there were people retired by 30’s or 40’s.
So now there’s a shift in my mindset and I will save as much as possible. I’m aiming to work 10-15 years and build my nut. Agree there could be a big drop soon in the markets but I hope to live long enough to reap the gains.
If you can live another 30-40 years realistically then you shouldn’t be too worried about a crash. Both the dot com and 08 ones recovered within 3-4 years.
Birth advantage plays the biggest part at maybe 50-80%. Luck is maybe 10%. Effort is maybe 10-40%. Sure there are people who came from nothing and get lucky. That isn’t the average though. The large portion of those with a lot of wealth had an advantage. Even if it was just a good education or a family friend who got them started in a business. You write of getting lucky, but you also don’t know the other paths not taken. You could have had a worse, better or no wife. You could have started the blog early failed early on and decided to quit. The things that happened did because you made them happen, including pursuing your wife and making a decision to be with her. You started to get media attention because you wrote an article that resonated with that reader. Still not luck. It really just depends on how you view things.
I think luck trumps most things. It’s hard to understand the lottery of birth when you are the Powerball winner, because you want to believe that it was you that made the money and your good fortune, but generally speaking it just isn’t true. My best friend married really wealthy, and one day I was sitting at the pool with her, her husband and his friend. His friend was talking about her husband’s family business, which is based upon 10% business and 90% luck IMO. Because of this business, her husband and his brothers could pursue any path they wanted, knowing they had that backing them up. My friend’s husband got mad when I implied that, and I wanted to turn to him and say his life is 99% luck. He “works” hard as an investor, but you have to have money to make money. He has never had a real job in his life, and has no appreciation for how hard it would be for most people to have the type of money he has. My husband and I do really well, top 5% of income and will never be able to touch their level of wealth. I have no problem with that, we don’t need to be on the same level, but I always get the feeling that he thinks it’s our fault we don’t have their kind of money.
Hi Sam,
I truly enjoyed that post. Thanks for your humility and honor. I too feel lucky for meeting my wife, the parents I was blessed to have, my health, the mentors who taught me the importance of saving/investing money. Gosh, I truly had so little to do with my success. 90% was luck and 10% was effort.
It only took 6 months of fear to actually get me to create a blog. It was after i met with other Rockstar forum people in person that actually got me the motivation.
I reflect on how i got to where i am a lot. There isn’t a thing i can’t link back to pure luck or chance. I would much rather apply cosmic luck to my general life that to waste any at the casino though ;)
I can’t believe successful people here are attributing their success to luck. I have been terrified to bring up the L word since senior year when my best friend (at the time) lectured me for a good 20 minutes about how it’s rude to tell someone they’re lucky because they got X. I didn’t mean any harm when I told her she was “lucky” to have a job lined up after graduation for a studio art major. “Art is all about talent and the hustle. It’s never luck.” Boy…was she mad.
I had dated a guy in the Marina who was a 28 year old COE and he absolutely rejected the notion of luck. He got to where he is by working constantly (it’s true) but he was lucky to have been brought up in a warm, safe household. He was lucky to have a caring mother give up her PhD so she can devote her attention to raising him. I wasn’t trying to take away his accomplishments at all. He does deserve everything he works for!
I just wanted him to see his humanity. Not take away his accomplishments. I’m still not going to use the L word, I’m literally scared to accuse others of luck.
It definitely used to annoy me I was younger whatever someone told me I was just lucky. But the older you get, the more you realize Luck plays a greater and greater factor in your life.
So now, if someone tells me I’m lucky, I tell them they’re absolutely right. I can’t believe my luck and I hope it continues. But if it goes away, then at least it was fun while it lasted.
Just don’t text someone at 3am who has been grinding for 80 hours that week they’re lucky. All will be good!
I am lucky to be healthy, allowing me to work hard. I am lucky to have a personality that is generally level headed and logical, allowing me to tackle tough situations in a professional manner. I am lucky to have the extra bit of motivation to keep me moving forward, when others may give up.
We all need to work hard but not all of us are given the opportunity to do so. For that I am grateful.
Great blog post Sam. I appreciate how hard it can be for successful and ambitious people to realize the role of luck. But totally agree with what you’ve proposed here. I’ve been reading Scott Adams’ most recent book and he also does a good job acknowledging good luck and fostering more of it. Thanks for the great reminder!
I have experienced success to be more likely the result of exposing yourself to lots and lots of opportunities.
You may apply 100 jobs and the 101 is the perfect match.
All your friends believe that you were lucky.
Really?
You have met a person with influence at a job fair and he/she is willing to mentor you.
Luck? Only if you do not consider the 35 job fairs you went to without talking to someone helpful.
I would rather think that success is 5% luck and 95% try and error.
In the beginning, it’s more effort than luck that’s for sure. But towards the end, it’s more luck than effort if you start pulling away from the median.
It is true that nobody got on the career fair bus at 6:30 AM to go to Washington DC. We waited for about 30 minutes and decided to take a town car and stood by switching the bus. But I didn’t get on the bus, there would be no job for sure.
I think you do yourself a disservice! Sure, it sounds lucky that you managed to drive that much traffic to your blog organically and get posts featured on major websites – but you made that happen!
If you didn’t put the work in to create a site full of great information that resonates with people, those opportunities would never have come your way, luck or not. Give yourself some credit! :)
You can say some people are lucky and some just don’t find luck…I was brought up as Catholic and praying to God is whom that will guide us. Some maybe lucky in money and not so lucky in love. Some maybe lucky in love but not so lucky in health. No matter what type of luck you may have, there is always something that may not be so lucky in. The best way is staying positive and staying with positive vibes and surroundings. It only takes one negative to break a positive. Once negative strikes, luck can come tumbling down. Luck is like a Volcano, it can erupt anytime. Nobody controls luck, your luck is unpredictable. Luck cannot be master or bought. A person is either born with Luck or Misfortune.
You are very right on just taking one bad break to have everything cascade down around you. And when dad bad break comes, I hope we can look back and appreciate all the luck we had until then and forge on through.
An accident is just right around the corner. But we can’t live our lives thinking this way.