May 06, 2004

Mostly luck

As regular readers will know I like John Brockman's the Edge . Invariably, I find something that gets me thinking. On my visit this morning, I found this little gem in an interview with Nassim Taleb, a thought that deserves some deep reflection:

"There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery ? in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business ? and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck."

Posted by richard at May 6, 2004 02:28 PM
Comments

I know I don't often add a comment, but oddly enough we were having a conversation about this one. Alex's theory is that one large differential is that people who do well are working at something they love. He thinks it's that one thing that often makes the difference (given that they are entrepreneurial, hard working, risk taking etc).

He saw the rise of quite a lot of entrepreneurs in the Crimea after 1990, and says that the successful ones seemed to actually love what they were doing. For the others it was more of a slog - and they often failed.

Interesting theory, what do you think?

Posted by: karen at May 9, 2004 01:31 PM
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