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You’re Lucky!
By JD Bluefield | April 23, 2008
Being told that you’re “lucky” in anything other than a dice roll is one of the most insulting things that anyone can tell you. Why? Because its a backhanded compliment to minimize whatever you’ve done to just plain dumb luck and that your success has nothing to do with how hard you worked or the effort you put in.
The other day, I was casually speaking with someone about stocks. He was distraught over his 401k and mutual fund holdings dropping over the last 6 months. At this point I have not revealed that I have this website on investing, so he asks me, “how are your stocks doing?”
“They’re doing fine,” I respond.
“If you have any money in the market it MUST be down, the DOW dropped like, 25%!”
“Some are down a little, but that’s okay,” I concede.
Puzzled he says, “Well, you must have a great financial advisor.”
“Oh, that would be me because I actually do it all myself, so thanks,” accepting his unintended compliment.
“Really, well, if you invest in mutual funds someone is still doing it for you, you know?”
Not knowing why that comment was necessary I let him know that, “I don’t have any mutual funds. I choose all my stocks individually.”
Without missing a beat he let me know, “wow, you know you’ve just been lucky then. And if you’re not in mutual funds then you’re not diversified.”
I started to tune out and began to steam as he went into a tirade on how he lost a lot of money in the Tech Bust, prospectuses are all BS and unless you know someone on the “inside” you got nothing… but now he has a great advisor, so he’s set.
Before I went into a vitriolic response with the opening line of “Riddle me this”, a sea of relaxation washed over me. I let him finish complaining and walked away. I realized that it would have been a complete waste of time to argue or try to convince this person any differently.
People like this discount your gains or successes because it’s the only way they can validate why they can’t do the same for themselves. These are the types of people who say, “cross your fingers” or “knock on wood”. They believe in “destiny”, “luck” and “signs”. So to separate themselves from the chaos, they convince themselves that they have no control over their own life and relinquish all responsibility to the cosmos. In this case, the person left responsibility to a financial advisor (who I’m sure he also blamed during the previous market fall-outs).
Don’t misunderstand the purpose of this post, I’m not here to bag on financial advisors… that’s for another day. But seriously, financial advisors help many people with their finances. I believe that you can achieve much more by investing on your own, but only IF you’re willing to do the homework.
There are people who believe in luck and those who believe in hard work. Even with hard work, there is a chance you can still fail, but if you’re just banking on luck, you’re just gambling. This applies to whatever you’re doing; investing, school exams, athletics, what have you. When you’ve done your research, studied or trained hard, don’t let anyone convince you that you’re “lucky”.
Those who do tell you, “you’re lucky”… do a cost-benefit-analysis on them, hand them back the Ouiji board and ACE them out of your life!
Read more on how I invest, and more on luck here.
Tomorrow… how to engineer luck out of the equation.
Topics: Goals, Investing, Personal Finance |
4 Responses to “You’re Lucky!”
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April 23rd, 2008 at 10:30 am
You are lucky! You have brains. That’s as random as it gets. That person you talked to is unlucky, he or she has no brains.
I don’t talk to people about investing. It gets too depressing. With all the information around us, they choose to depend on strangers.
The mass of people depend on the govt to solve all the problems. Those unlucky people don’t know that they too can become lucky. They choose to be unlucky, just as you choose to be lucky. It’s a good thing.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:48 am
i agree, we make our own destiny and luck is a bi-product.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I totally agree but I can see where your friend was coming from. I used to think like that too when I first started working out of high school and started puting money in TSP. The whole investing thing seemed like gambling or luck to me. But it wasnt til I started talking to people and reading a little bit into that I realized that although there is some luck, like if 911 type thing happens, most of it is reading and investigating on your own and making smart investments decisions knowing all the risks involved. I was contimplating on getting a financial advisor but paying a guy $500 a year to tell me what mutual fund or stock to put my money into is crazy. I also came to the realization that if this guy is that good at investing why is he working at all and not on a yaht somewhere living the high life. Also I dont think I could blindly trust someone with where to put my retiremnt money or investment money. Any way thats what I got buddys like JD for.
April 30th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
If you don’t do your research it is like gambling.