While I was enjoying my usual cup of Café Latte at Starbucks, I overheard some guys talking at the table next to me. It was a tale about a friend who just made half a million from real estate boom. Although this is a story I’ve heard a million times, but one particular thing that caught my attention is – he was attributing his friend’s success to luck. Basically what he said is “HE IS JUST LUCKY!” So I wondered, ‘what has luck got to do with wealth?’
Lucky millionaires DO exist
Two months ago, I posted an article about how more money is NOT a solution to bad financial management. In it I mentioned three kinds of people and among them, Poor John and Average Joe are probably the most relatable characters. Luck does not pick and choose. Whether you’re a Poor John earning RM3k a month or an Average Joe earning RM10K a month. Anyone can get lucky! Take for example a tool and die employee who stumbled upon a painting worth $1.2 million that he bought for only $30 at a flea market!
What’s even more surprising was the story of a farmer living in Suffolk, England. The farmer lost his hammer one day, in one of the fields he owned. He asked his friend to help him find it using a metal detector. Instead, what he found was a staggering amount of Roman Empire era jewelry, cutlery, coins, and statues consisting of more than 15,000 pieces! This gigantic treasure trove was worth £1.75 million! Even though these are very rare and special cases, what’s not so marvelous are lottery wins. Surprisingly, Powerball recently sold three winning tickets all over America with the combined worth of $1.56 billion! Three lucky winners from, Florida, Tennessee, and California claimed a cool $533 million each on January 14th. This was the world’s largest lottery jackpot ever recorded!
However, winning the lottery is almost never associated with good fortune! There is no doubt that lottery winners are lucky but they are prone to be targeted by people with malicious intent. Most of them tend to lose it all on trivial things just like professional athlete Mike Tyson. This is supported by the 2005 documentary, ‘Reversal of Fortune‘ in which a homeless person is given $100,000 dollars to spend however he wishes. Since he didn’t have a financial plan, all of his newfound wealth was spent within a couple of weeks!
Luck is Self-made
In 2011, 15 year old Nick D’Aloisio made $30 million dollars from an app that he made from his bedroom! He sold the artificial intelligence app Summly to Yahoo which made him the youngest and richest student cum entrepreneur, overnight! However, instead of just spending it all, he decided to invest it in a trust fund managed by his parents. Is this what you call luck? Guess not. However, he wasn’t just a one-hit-wonder. The first app he made was Trimit and he desperate for his app to get attention, so he bombarded Gizmodo with hundreds of emails! Unsurprisingly, Gizmodo felt harassed and decided to feature his creation on their worst apps list! This made D’Aloisio extremely emotional. literally, Gizmodo made him cry. That just goes to show his devotion to make that ‘luck’ happen! He made Summly a few months later and the rest is history!
How to make Luck
“Luck is a product of process, action, work, and being out there”, said MJ DeMarco. “Only the rich get lucky” is a very disempowering belief by people who don’t believe in hard work but in easy payoffs. When you do a process long enough and hard enough, luck comes as an aftereffect! D’Aloisio wasn’t born with the knowledge to create algorithms. Everybody sees the money he made but not his process of learning such a hard subject. Most people don’t want to go through the process and end up spending thousands of dollars a year on lotteries, hoping to hit the jackpot. If you want wealth through luck, you will keep buying lottery and wait for your jackpot, which will never come.
Most people ignore how Warren Buffett got so wealthy by doing the same things over and over again! He lets compound interest work for him by investing in boring businesses. Buffett went through the PROCESS. That’s self-made luck.
Being at the right place and at the right time no longer becomes a question of luck if you’ve taken the right steps. People like Bill Gates may have invented something out of pure luck according to Average Joe or Poor John, but what about his company? A whole company cannot be built solely on luck! If you’ve gone through the process and worked hard to put yourself out there then opportunities will come. There is no doubt about that!
The bottom line is, there is no magic pill or easy system that can ensure the production of wealth for you. People who say “this magic diet pill will make you lose weight without lifting a finger” are scamming people who don’t want to exercise and work hard. People will always look for the easy way out. It’s not uncommon for people to pay less and expect a lot more in return or an automatic profit! I will tell you that luck doesn’t produce Apple, Facebook, Google, or even Genting and the Public Bank of Malaysia! Wealth is acquired through continuous hard work over long periods of time and the patience to persevere. No luck involved.
To stop betting on luck and learn the system I personally use to acquire wealth, check out this first ever online course I created called Money Automation System.
