Are You Feeling Lucky?
In the last – wait for it – 34-years of my career, I have often noticed that there are a lot of people in senior positions that quite honestly are average or worse than average at their jobs. Now, in those years, I have also interacted with and met an awful lot of very bright and talented people – my days at Sybase in the late 1990’s probably rank as the most productive in terms of rubbing shoulders with geniuses…yet, I have constantly puzzled over some of those that I have met who are rich, successful and frankly, incompetent. I recall about 12-years ago, being highly involved with hedge funds in the commodities space – you know, those financial whizz kids, guru’s and innovative, dynamic secretive people. I worked with a colleague to vet managers of many funds and I recall feeling really disappointed. Yes, I did meet a couple of people who I felt were extremely smart but the vast majority were average or less than average in my mind. I mean, anyone can make money going long on crude oil when the fundamentals show its in short supply… nothing special there. I wasn’t surprised when the tide changed, that many of these same managers went bust fairly quickly. I also recall meeting a senior oil industry guy who constantly landed CEO and COO type jobs yet I couldn’t fathom how. Each company lasted a couple of years before going belly up and five minutes later, there he was running another good business into oblivion and making a packet of cash for doing so.
I think we all know people like this. Perhaps we all share this suspicion that there is some magic formula to success. A lot of money gets spent on personal coaching, positive thinking, popular books about how to succeed in three, five or seven steps – or indeed about how successful people behave. It’s an industry that regurgitates pop formulae for success. Then, there is the thinking that its all about who you know and not what you know. Well, these theories may all be completely wrong.
According to some recent research, success is down to …… luck. This BBC news article is one of many discussing this startling news and research but it is interesting to pull out a couple of quotes from the researchers involved such as, “very often, the most successful people are moderately talented but very lucky,” and “we discovered a strict correlation between luck and success. Encountering a series of lucky events was responsible for incredible success even if their individual talent was lower than super talented people.” So there you have it. As I long suspected, success isn’t earned – its all about the lucky break or lucky circumstances that transpire in your life/career. Average, but lucky people make it big.
I’d leave this article – which admittedly is a little off topic – right here except for one thing. Don’t we make our own luck?
Have a lucky day….
