Category Archives: Philosophy

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It’s Not Lotto, It’s Life

The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get
by Ken Goldstein
Eighth in a Series of Ten

The quote in the subtitle above, “The harder you work, the luckier you get” has been attributed to so many individuals it is probably best accepted as a cliché, but since I heard it first and most often from my father, I’m giving him the credit.  I’ll apply another cliché, “minor poets borrow, great poets steal,” so credit here is probably less important than viral sharing, which is the value of any common sense idea broadly distributed.

Yet how common is the common sense in seeking luck by giving your all to what you do? Those seem like different things. Luck is elusive, ephemeral, it may not even exist except in hindsight, as a descriptor rather than a force. Work is what you do, effort that you control, with results that may or may not have the impact you desire based on any number of uncontrollable market forces. You cannot will good fortune anymore than you can guarantee an outcome where you cannot predict and guide any number of moving parts well beyond your scope of influence.

Or can you? Think about this for a moment, the people in business who you would call lucky — do they tend to be lucky once or lucky many times over? You would probably answer both. So let’s toss out the one timers and call them lottery winners, nothing we can learn there except sometimes good stuff happens to both good and bad people, and that’s just it, it happens. Now let’s think about the consistently lucky individuals we see winning over and over, in good times and bad. Are there any consistencies in their actions? My guess is that they may just be working a little harder than their competition, pushing themselves intellectually beyond the obvious tasks that others do to get by, challenging themselves to Think Different and really work a complex set of issues to unexpected outcomes. I am not sure they make luck happen, but they do allow themselves to be in positions where they can be more often than others open to unusual and often positive circumstances. They might be just a little more dedicated than others, just a little more optimistic about creativity as a tool, just a little more self-energized to seize upon an unexpected win scenario when it appears out of nowhere.

Last month in a Wall Street Journal column entitled “How to Get a Real Education,” not less than Scott Adams, the visionary mind behind Dilbert, offered this among his tidbits of advice to college students whom he was trying to give a shortcut to success given his own treks through the school of hard knocks. Wrote Adams under the header Attract Luck:

You can’t manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn’t work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It’s not obvious to a teenager.

Fans of popular quotes may hear the echo of Pasteur’s “Fortune favors the prepared mind” in the words of Dilbert’s creator, which simply reinforces the same theme.  Harnessing luck might be akin to catching lightning in a bottle, but how are you going to capture the lightning if you don’t have a bottle ready, and if you aren’t willing to get wet in a storm without real expectation of what’s awaiting you under the clouds?  What’s out there that can change your life for the better or improve your success ratios is seldom obvious or clearly labeled, but if you aren’t on an active quest, your chances of bumping into it will be awfully low.

Hockey great Wayne Gretzky bottles this in yet another flavor: “You will miss 100% of shots you don’t take.”  How often in all sport do we hear the announcer say on a big point or play, “Now that was lucky!”  Sometimes it is, and we may need a bit of luck to break the stalemate when the other team is our equal in every way.  Yet is it really luck, or is it captured opportunity because we were trying just a little bit harder at that moment.  Who can say, probably a little of both.  I’ll take it.

There is another argument that reminds us to maintain humility in a lucky outcome.  We can only take so much credit for what we do, and if we are humble about recognizing what we did accomplish and that from which we simply benefitted, my sense is we have a lot more chance of it happening again — or at least of our peers not taking us for fools or blowhards when we don’t acknowledge the fate factor in our success tracts.  That which we can control is our effort, our ethics, and attitude, I would say people who strive to take those items very seriously in a team approach are going to be beneficiaries of luck now and again, maybe not when we most want, but often when we least expect it.

Perhaps it is just the word itself, luck, which causes us the problem, because we can’t prove it exists and we can’t reach in our quiver and pull out the luck arrow when we face a nasty monster.  So how about another word that could be a better factor in our control: openness.  Then we might have: “The more you remain open to opportunity by pursuing it in different venues, the more chance opportunity may have of finding you.”  Nah, too many words, I liked the original quote better — but I’ll keep an open mind about a better phrasing that might emerge.

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Attributes in Balance

Our Greatest Strengths Are Our Greatest Weaknesses
by Ken Goldstein
Seventh in a Series of Ten

Many years ago a company where I held a senior position suggested a “voluntary task” that our executive team all take the Myers-Briggs “Personality Test” to help us better understand our “management styles.” Deeply suspicious and mistrustful of the kinds of words I put in quotations in the prior sentence and the ability for a series of multiple choice questions to tell me anything of business or psychological value, I only reluctantly complied to gently nudge Dilbert from the premises. To my great surprise, although I found most of the questions telegraph transparent and almost silly obvious, the results of that test seemed remarkably accurate to me. Rather than find myself in a defensive posture, I was actually quite pleased with the summary — I found it to make sense, and I liked what it implied. That’s when the learning began.

To this day I will never forget discussing the attribute matrix with our head of Human Resources, which served as an incredible bridge between my view of the world and hers, and led to a tremendous lifelong friendship. She agreed the summary was a good reflection of reality, and she was pleased that I was pleased because it meant I would stop widely dismissing the test as brain-dead corporate-speak. Then she made it make sense without judgment or criticism; her words were simple, memorable, and strangely this was the very first time I had heard them, the words captured in the sub-head above: “Our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses.”

That’s one I wish I had known and digested thirty years prior, maybe around birth, because it is not at all terribly intuitive and not something one of your high school or college friends, teachers, or coaches is likely to blurt out. So what does it mean?

Suppose you are an extremely independent thinker, you don’t much worry about what the crowd says, you let the noise blow past your ears and stick to your muse, to what you believe is true and right and just and fair and a winning approach. That’s a very good thing, right? It is a strength of which you can be proud, it will keep your eyes on your moral compass and let you make honest, uncompromised, unpolluted decisions everyday that steer you and your team to unprecedented success. You go, fellow! A strength is a strength and you got one.

But wait! What if there is another voice in the room that could ever so slightly adjust your approach, if only you heard it. What if the collective wisdom of those around you can improve your opinion, and with it build a consensus that becomes everyone’s shared moral compass. Isn’t that better? Well of course it is, especially if it’s more right than where you started. Yet you have this amazing strength to stay focused, so you don’t hear it, or you don’t encourage others to articulate it. So how is your strength a strength if it doesn’t get you the best possible point of view on an approach?

Oh, that’s fuzzy and messy, isn’t it? Not quite as clear and straightforward as we hoped. Now let’s flip it the other way.

Suppose you are a spectacular listener and consensus builder, the best ever. Your team actually looks forward to meetings because they know everyone has a say in everything, that their voices will always be heard and you will never move forward without consensus. Your colleagues across the board think you are great, kind, wonderful, open, accessible, even friendly.  That’s an incredible strength, you are a genuine team player. Your strength is your people skills, that too rare comforting gift which we seldom see in abundance.

Yet what if the team could not come to consensus? What if there is no shared point of view, no collaborative moral compass? What if the people around you are shooting from the hip? They haven’t really researched the facts on the topic at hand, but since you expect contributions from all they feel they have to say something even if it is not well-considered. So now you have a dialogue, but you don’t have a punchline. Or worse, you have a consensus, but because the input was tarnished, the direction you are taking is clearly wrong out of the gate. You remain respected for your strength, but when you get to the edge of Niagara Falls, you are still going to tumble over the edge with a mighty hard landing awaiting you in the rocks below.

The other side of strength may be weakness, and the other side of weakness may be strength. Balance is the hard part, and balance is what you find in the collective wisdom and talents of those around you. A quarterback leading the league in passing might be forced off his game by a smart defense, but does he know that and what is he doing with that knowledge? A virtuoso guitarist in a band may have the limelight and power to stand center stage, but is her voice the best to carry the song? These are not easy lessons or easy choices, but the answer is most often in the ask, and the ask is what we don’t often enough unravel.

With your talent came some offsets; unless you are superhuman that’s a fact. To know the offset is to enhance the talent. To balance the offset is to give the talent life.

That HR VP sure knew her stuff.  I am glad I learned to listen to her. Before the Myers-Briggs test, I probably wouldn’t have.

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What Iron Mike Got Right

Plan All You Want, But Be Nimble
by Ken Goldstein
Sixth in a Series of Ten

I’m not at all a fan of Mike Tyson, but his most memorable and useful quote in my mind remains: “A plan is something you have, until you get hit.”  I have a Hebrew carving in my home that says this a different way, “Man Plans and God Laughs.”  One of my earliest mentors, the great writer David Milch, said it yet another way, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

Yesterday at the Los Angeles Times Festival of books, magician and author Ricky Jay was asked by someone in the audience, “If I want to be a magician, what do I study in college?”  Ricky couldn’t answer the question.  A friend of his, a professor in the USC creative writing program was also in the audience, so Ricky kicked it to him — he couldn’t answer it either.  Ricky wasn’t sure how to tell the student to prepare for life’s later adventures, because as he reflected, if you asked him at college age if he would be writing for the New Yorker and doing radio commentaries and writing books of historical anecdotes and also doing magic at this age, he never could have predicted it, maybe the magic.  Patti Smith, who won the National Book Award for Just Kids, her memoir about artist Robert Mappelthorpe, was equally sage — she wondered why she had to be labeled an author or a musician or a poet or a painter, couldn’t a creative life be OK in simply exploring the creative process.  “What would Da Vinci have answered?” she asked, “Oh come on, Leonardo, which are you, a painter, a sculptor, a scientist, you can’t really be all of those.”  Did he know he would be all of those, and at a level that would last and command respect for so many generations to follow?  What if he had simply stuck to The Plan?  Could any of us predict where we are now at a level of detail that would paint an accurate picture?  Then toss in the hits.  I wonder.

To the point of a plan, yes, I think you should have one at any given time.  With a road map you will probably get somewhere, maybe not to the precise destination you originally intended, but somewhere that eventually makes sense.  Without any road map, you will more likely wander, which is not the same as exploration, and not necessarily a bad thing.  With no map, no plan, you may get somewhere you like in a time frame that is right for you, but how many of us are really comfortable with that little structure?  Even Kerouac and the Merry Pranksters thought they were going somewhere, but it was the detours that came to matter most to them.

So what about that part where the surprise left or right jab literally knocks the thinking process from your brain?  That was Tyson’s point, and the metaphor is crystal clear.  You train for the fight, you study your opponent’s every move, and you go into the ring knowing exactly what to do.  Then he does something different and you get clobbered.  Your head is ringing, you can’t see straight, but the fight is not over unless you let it be.  That’s when you decide if there is another chapter, can you react, can you recalculate on the fly, do you have another idea?  Your plan has crumbled, but you’re still in the fight, unless you choose otherwise.

The ability to plan and prepare, be directed and be focused, these are elements of success.  Yet equally critical is the know how to accept the extemporaneous and be ready, always ready, to seize opportunity on a second’s notice when every rule you believe to be true is changed, spun, flipped, or junked.  Knowing that a fork is there in the road takes staggering intuition that you may not even know you are calling on when it happens, because that fork won’t be labeled, that sucker punch won’t be broadcast, that opportunity when you get to it will not say “Walk This Way.”

I have one friend who recently went from a boss who thought she was a star to a boss who can’t find anything she does right.  I have another friend who thought he beat cancer, then awoke one day to discover he is going to have to beat it again.  Three friends who believed they were in forever marriages are now going through divorce.  A vast handful of former employees who never thought they would see a layoff notice were met over the past few years with a surprise to the contrary.  In no event did The Plans for any of these people include these brutal hits.  In no event have they wholeheartedly abandoned their long cherished plans.  Yet in no event have their plans gone without editing, adjustment, or real-time recalibration.  It would be too crass to say they are rolling with the punches, a true hit doesn’t much let you roll, but shaken as they are, they are reacting, and they are on their feet with resilience and conviction.

There is a difference between focus and rigidity, just like there is a difference between improvisation and chaos. You can’t predict an outcome, but when you are looking back, you’ll see where those inflection points appeared and you were simultaneously grounded and flexible.  It’s a tough balancing act, but it’s one that can separate win from loss, modest success from great success, definition from label.

Be directed, but be fluid.  Don’t get knocked off your game, and don’t refuse to play simply because someone changes the rules.  Prepare, then pivot.

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In The Long Run

No Pay Out Is Assured, But Some Reflect History
by Ken Goldstein
Fifth in a Series of Ten

One of the hardest yet most pragmatic lessons I have had to learn and re-learn over time is the fundamental difference between speculating and investing. I have found in both finance and career choices, there is a considered role in my life for each. For my own digestion, I have boiled it down to this:

Speculation is a bet, a gamble, a short-term play where intuition plays a key role. If you win, you party; if you lose, you shrug it off. It can be fun and exciting, but it should never be meant to put what you most care about at risk.

Investment is an allocation of resources, capital or otherwise, a long-term play where logic plays the key role. If you win, you most likely got an outcome you wanted; if you lose, you refine and recommit to your strategy, then try again. It is hard work and often gruelingly repetitive, but it is the least emotional consistent path to success and independence.

Casino gambling, lottery tickets, buying individual equities on a friendly (but never insider) tip, quitting your job in a snit because you believe you are better than the job you have and are unquestionably in high demand — these are examples of speculation. You do these things — if at all — when you are in a safety zone, when you can sustain the outcomes without ruining your life or family’s security.

Higher education, buying a fairly priced home to inhabit with a reasonable mortgage, allocating your savings or retirement across a fully diversified set of passively traded asset classes, finding a mentor and sticking with a tough job while charting your career arc — these are examples of investing. You do these things as opportunity allows, ignoring the distractions and noise of the latest media ramblings or get rich quick schemes, to build your net worth and reputation day by day.

Does that mean you should never speculate? Of course not, but only when you can afford to completely lose whatever you have at stake. Risk and reward are not good or bad, they are real functions that warrant each other. If high reward did not accompany high risk, there would be no reason for either. Both when you invest and you speculate, reward is your compensation for the risk you are willing to take. That’s why a CD pays so little interest, because the risk of losing your capital is almost non-existent.  Meanwhile, the latest IPO could see a company double or triple in value in hours, because just as quickly it could be worth half or less of the capital that purchased shares.

There are many individuals, funds, and companies that are well positioned to take extraordinary risk, they might not even consider their choices to be speculation because they allocate resources without ever betting the farm. For most individuals, these risks are simply too extraordinary, but if you do choose to take them, understand what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Likewise in getting an education and building a career path, know what you are doing.  You don’t have to presume the investment path is slow and steady, it can be suddenly meteoric.  But for most of us, those “overnight successes” arrive after many extraordinary hard years of work, focus, and even sacrifice.  I remember David Seidler, the screenwriter of The King’s Speech, saying on the Academy Awards as he received his Oscar at 70 years old this year, “My father always said to me I would be a late bloomer.”  My sense is that award gave him great pride, but what gave him even greater pride was the quality of the work he had created, because of his own life choice to invest his precious time in developing his talent.  That to me screams investment, just like a 401k plan that bounced back if you stayed allocated in the market through the recession.  Others may win the Academy Award on the only screenplay they ever wrote, or quadruple their money on secondary market exchanges; I wish them nothing but well if they do, and hope they have a day job if they don’t.

Work hard, play hard; fully comprehend the difference between long-term and short-term.  We’ll get to the notion of luck in a later post!