Make Luck Your Destiny

I think it's pretty interesting that the first three kinds of luck that you described, there are very common clichés for them that everybody knows. And then for that last kind of luck, that comes to you out of the unique way that you act, there's no real cliché for it.

So, for the first three kinds, there is dumb luck or blind luck; that's the first kind of luck. The second kind of luck does the cliché that fortune favors the bold; that's a person who gets lucky just by stirring the pot and acting. The third kind of luck, people say that chance favors the prepared mind.

But for the fourth kind of luck, there is not really a common cliché out there that matches the unique character of your action, which I think is interesting and perhaps an opportunity. It also just shows that people aren't necessarily taking advantage of that kind of luck the way they should be.

I think also at that point, it starts becoming so deterministic that it stops being luck, so the definition starts fading from luck to more destiny. So, I would characterize that fourth one as you build your character in a certain way, and then your character becomes your destiny.

One of the things I think that is important to making money when you want the kind of reputation that makes people do deals through you. You know, I use the example of like, if you're a great diver, then treasure hunters will come and give you pieces of treasure for your diving skills. If you're a trusted, reliable, high integrity, long-term thinking deal maker, then when other people want to do deals but they don't know how to do them in a trustworthy manner with strangers, they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal or offer you a unique deal just because of the integrity and reputation that you've built up.

Warren Buffett, he gets offered deals, and he gets to buy companies, and he gets to file warrants and bail out banks and do things that other people can't do because of his reputation. But of course, that's fragile. It has accountability on the line; it has a strong brand on the line. And as we will talk about later, that comes with accountability attached.

But I would say your character, your reputation, these are things that you can build that then will let you take out advantages of opportunities that others will make characterize lucky, but you know that it wasn't luck.

You said that this fourth kind of luck is more or less a destiny. There's a quote from that original book that was in Mark's blog post from Benjamin Disraeli, who I think was the former Prime Minister of the UK. The quote to describe this kind of luck was: "We make our fortunes, and we call them fate."

There were a couple of other interesting things about this kind of luck that were mentioned in the blog post. I think it'll be good for the listeners to hear about, is that this fourth kind of luck can almost come out of eccentric ways that you do your things and that eccentricity is not necessarily a bad thing in this case. In fact, it's a good thing.

Yeah, absolutely, because the world is a very efficient place. So everyone has dug through all the obvious places to dig. And so to find something that's new and novel and uncovered, it helps to be operating on a frontier where right there you have to be a little eccentric to be out on the frontier by yourself.

And then you just have to be willing to dig deeper than other people do, deeper than seems irrational, just because you're interested.

Yeah, the two quotes that I've seen that expressed this kind of luck, in addition to that Benjamin Disraeli one, are this one from Sam Altman where he said, "Extreme people get extreme results." I think that's pretty nice. And then there's this other one from Jeffrey Pfeffer, who is a professor at Stanford, that you can't be normal and expect abnormal returns. I've always enjoyed that one too.

Yeah, and one quote that I like, which is the exact opposite of that, is, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." All right, a lot of people spend a lot of their time playing social games like on Twitter, where you're just trying to improve your social standing, and you basically win stupid social prizes...