Good morning friends!
I have nothing witty or exciting to say this morning, so enjoy this picture of me sitting next to a cannon.
I have been re-reading The Psychology of Money (affiliate link) by Morgan Housel this past week, and there is one chapter that has really stuck out to me, which is about the role luck plays in our lives.
Success and failure do not purely come down to laziness or intelligence. Luck and risk are some of the biggest driving forces behind why some people are super successful.
An example in the book is Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft.
Gates attended Lakeside School in Seattle in the late 1960s. One of the teachers there strongly believed that students should know a little about computers before they go to university or college.
He petitioned to use the Lakeside School Mothers’ Club funds to lease a Teletype Model 30 in the school (about ~$30,000 in todays money). For reference, many universities didn’t have any computer this advanced, yet Bill Gates had access to one in eighth grade!
Gates had the opportunity to play around with high-end computers at the time and learn to code from a very young age.
As this article explains, the chance of this happening is very slim:
In 1968 there were roughly 303 million high-school-age people in the world, according to the UN.
About 18 million of them lived in the United States, and about 270,000 of them lived in Washington state.
A little over 100,000 of them lived in the Seattle area.
And only about 300 of them attended Lakeside School.
Start with 300 million, end with 300.
One in a million high-school-age students attended the high school that had the combination of cash and foresight to buy a computer. Bill Gates happened to be one of them.
Obviously, Gates is still an extraordinary individual, as I am sure very few people in his position would go on to build Microsoft. He clearly is a hard-working and genius individual, but even he said:
If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft.
However, only some get lucky, and there is also risk.
Some may know that Gates founded Microsoft with his close friend Paul Allen, who also attended Lakeside school. The two met in the computer lab, where they shared a deep enthusiasm for computers and coding.
Gates and Allen became billionaires from Microsoft, but there was a third member of the little Lakeside Computer group, Kent Evans.
Evans and Gates were best friends and spoke on the phone practically every night. According to Gates, Evans was the smartest student in the eighth grade. A great passage from the book highlights this:
Evans was as skilled with computers as Gates and Allen. Lakeside once struggled to manually put together the school’s class schedule — a maze of complexity to get hundreds of students the classes they need at times that don’t conflict with other courses. The school tasked Bill and Kent — children, by any measure — to build a computer program to solve the problem. It worked.
Evans likely would have gone on to co-found Microsoft, but sadly, it was not meant to be. He unfortunately died in a mountaineering accident when he was 17, which is around a one in a million chance.
Gates and Evans both experienced a one in a million event, just in opposite directions.
What does this mean for us? Well, it shows that sometimes our successes and failures are entirely out of our control, and not everyone rich is due solely to their hard work or talent.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to work towards our goals, but rather, we should be aware that things can occur that we ultimately can’t control.
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✍️ Article — 3 Ways to Create Luck in Your Career. Another
article I read this week. We really underestimate the power of luck in people's lives, as I discussed above. This article gives tips on how to increase your luck.🎬 Video — Some bad code just broke a billion Windows machines. Unless you live under a rock, you probably have heard of the massive Microsoft computer outage last Friday. This video comically explains what happened and why there was such a problem.
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So well said! The examples Housel gave are similar to the ideas in The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
Bottom line for our everyday life: work hard, be prepared when opportunities present themselves, and have fun and let life take you to its directions.