Let me tell you a story.
It’s about luck and risk, and what an indispensable role they play in our lives. It’s an interesting story, don’t worry, and it won’t bore you to death. At all.
It features Bill Gates, one whom so many of you already know, and Kent Evans, whom, maybe many of you don’t.
How are the two of them related, though?
Yes, their stories are connected, mainly because they once used to share a very strong bond. It goes back to childhood.
They went to the same school, became best friends in eighth grade from there and then went on to the same high school, Lakeside, just outside Seattle. They were computer genuinses, both had the same amount of dedication and skill to create something great.
Both of them possessed great visions.
Yet one of them went on in life to become the founder of a company worth more than a trillion dollars, and yet, the other, equally talented, has his name nowhere in history.
He could’ve been the founding partner of Microsoft, Bill Gates himself reminisced their friendship, but unfortunately that never happened.
Kent died on a mountaineering expedition when he was still in high school.
Now, you might be wondering, because I definitely was, why both of them—equipped with equally skillful minds and ideas—were rewarded with polar opposite futures. In fact, Kent didn’t even have one. Why was it so? When both were working hard and smart to achieve something in life. They had even planned to go to college together.
In the book, The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel, I come across the answer.
The Role of Luck and Risk
Bill Gates had a powerful dose of luck working in his favour, carrying him to the top of the industry; though that, by no means implies that all of his achievements are owed to luck. He surely had a skillful brain that, added to his own hardwork and patience, led him there.
But Kent Evans, on the other hand, had a very powerful, but very opposite dose of risk working against him, preventing him from what he had dreamed to achieve.
They both had done their individual efforts in life, but due to realistic factors other than those efforts—namely, luck and risk—they both received opposite outcomes.
As Morgan Housel states in his book:
Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than the individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes.
… For every Bill Gates there is a Kent Evans who was just as skilled and driven but ended up on the other side of life roulette.
That’s so unfair.
That might be true, but it’s so unfair.
It practically screams into our heads that no matter how hard we try, there’s always gonna be this luck factor that can change the game.
No.
No, no, no.
That’s not what I want with my life. I want to work, and I want to create my own luck, my own destiny. I want to change the game myself, not have someone else change it for me.
That’s what I want. And I can’t live with luck always roaming over my head, threatening to dump all that I’ve done, into waste.
So I dig deeper into the matter.
A Stroke of Luck
Because I just couldn’t take the chance. I wanted to create my luck, and though, I was risking it all, I wasn’t going to let that risk work agaisnt my efforts.
While searching material for this blog, I came across a memory of a TV show I had once watched when I was a child. It was of a mountain climber whose right hand was caught between a boulder and the side of the rocky mountain, and after 127 hours of futile struggle, he at last made a conscious decision to cut off his trapped arm with a blunt knife from his toolkit.
Oh my God.
And yeah, at that time I thought, “Oh God, that must’ve been gory, cutting the skin, and then the bone and all. That must’ve hurt, that must’ve…” and I couldn’t really imagine it in my mind, because I didn’t want to, because…I…uh.
But that’s not what he—Aron Ralston—was thinking at that time. He was thinking about surviving, thinking that if he did this he could live without an arm, but he could at least live.
He was thinking about going on living, about not giving up.
When though, all the forces of nature were against him.
And my mother asked me after I recalled this memory to her, “What did you realize by this? What did you learn by this?”
And, you know, I just shrugged and replied, “Never to go mountaineering?”
No, that’s not really the lesson I learnt.
I learnt that even after risk and bad luck, people end up surviving.
The Chance of Peril
Kent Evans had different situations during his mountaineering accident, and Aron Ralston had different. Therefore, one of them was able to beat the bad luck and one wasn’t. One succumbed, and the other went on to live with a prosthetic limb. He’s 47 years of age now.
What I learnt from both of these is that, yeah, luck does play a role.
And then suddenly all I could think about was how I could beat the bad luck. Win the roulette, you know. Minimize the risk.
By the way, in case you wanna read a post about minimizing risks and walking forward with maximum confidence and experience, you can check this out: Take That Risk.
In the book The Alamanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson, at last, I read something that gave me a little hope in this world of unfairness and complexities.
Naval Ravikant talked about four kinds of luck, or four ways to get lucky, whatever you wanna call it. And I liked this approach since the very beginning.
Ways to Get Lucky and Avoiding Risk
#1. Hope to get lucky.
Basic and simple. It’s called blind luck, fortune, fate—goes by many names. This is the kind of luck I have nothing to do with. It’s only for people who have enough money to spend it in lottery tickets, hoping they’d win the chance someday.
#2. Hustle until you stumble into it.
This is where you work extremely hard, you remain persistent and patient, put in a lot of energy and skill. Your blood, sweat and tears, just enough for luck to come and find you. Hah…okay. Not really preferable to me, but I think it’s an okay approach.
#3. Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss.
This is where you train your mind and become very good at spotting any new opportunities or chances that others might miss. In a way, you strive off others’ ignorance. You notice everything, then grabt the right opportunities.
#4. Change, Develop, Moderate
This is my favourite kind. In this, you become the absolute best in whatever filed you’re in. You keep redefining yourself until you are who you want to be. You build a character, a mindset, a routine, a brand and you make it epic. In this way, you’re not sitting around and waiting for luck to bump to you. You are creating your luck. You are building an empire and you are building a destiny. As you wish.
This is what I aim to do.
This is what I aim to reach.
And I think that this is the kind of luck that beats all. It beats the risk, it beats the bad luck, it beats any forces of the universe that want to prevent you from where you want to go. I think this is the solution to the paradox.
Luck and Risk and Us
I wondered if hard work mattered, or only luck did. And I got the answer with this because I realised that yeah, you could make your luck work, if you really wanted to. But along with the luck came the possibility of risk.
You can be lucky in stock market, you can be rich, like ridiculously rich. But along with that wealth and fortune would also come the possibility of risk.
If you create your luck, however, and don’t just depended on the force of the nature to carry you forward, I don’t think the bad luck plays any role either. It’s just you. If you don’t take help of luck, you won’t be needed to take care of bad luck either.
This is how you cheat luck.
And I think this is a pretty powerful approach, don’t you feel so?
I think this is wonderful, being allowed to work so hard and give everything you have to get that one thing you want, and not owing it to anyone.
Where do we come in?
Now where do we come in?
We began this post with how Bill Gates and Kent Evans had destinies form the opposite corners of the universe. And we are going to end this post with how there are similar examples of this in our life too. For every Bill Gates there is a Kent Evans who just had a different set of deciding factors in his life constructing his future. Both had put in the same individual effort, but Bill Gates succeeded and Kent Evans did not.
But in the end, it’s only us who decide who we want to be. Bill Gates or Kent Evans?
Do we want luck or risk? Of course, do we even need to answer that?
Everyone wants luck!
But no one can decide!
No one can decide whether they have luck or risk, in this approach anyway. So why not take a different approach, altogether? Why not forget about luck and risk whatsoever and start building our own destiny, where we don’t even need any luck to win?
This is how you beat the luck.
