Feeling Lucky? Channel Clint and Make Your Own Day!

 Want to be rich and successful? Then you’ve got to ask yourself one question, “Do you feel lucky?”

Right now I'm channeling Clint Eastwood - who most recently stole my heart with his Super Bowl ad challenging America to get back in the game. But who can forget Clint growling the question while pointing a gun that may or may not be loaded at the "punk" in "Dirty Harry."

The link between luck and success is so firmly established in our collective consciousness it has inspired research at universities from Stanford to Princeton. Even mathematicians have spent countless hours quantifying luck with formulas that look something like “λ(E)=Δ(E) ^* [1-pr(E)].”

Okay, it’s Greek to me too, but the number guys tell us that luck is a function of the probability of an event happening and the impact the event would have on us.  By the way, the impact can be positive or negative.

More new age types engaged in the “science of luck” believe that individuals can improve their luck with an intentional focus of positive energy. Like Clint, I believe our national comeback and our personal good fortune starts with believing in ourselves. Before you cry “Balderdash,” consider the opinions of some of the nation’s most successful investors. Seventy percent of $25 million- plus Americans attribute their wealth to “being in the right place at the right time,” according to Millionaire Corner research. Two-thirds identify “luck” as one of the key secrets to their success.

A lot of us – including folks who buy lottery tickets and those who play high-stakes poker – want to know why these people seem to have all the luck. Venture capitalist Anthony Tjan, who in his spare time blogs for the Harvard Business Review, believes that being lucky in business is fundamentally about having “the right lucky attitude.”

Tjan bases his opinion on hundreds of interviews conducted while researching a book on luck. Perhaps most interestingly, Tjan has learned that a lucky attitude begins with humility – the root of self awareness. The theory syncs with other research concluding that lucky people are simply better at recognizing good fortune when it comes their way. Beth Goldstien takes the humility/self-awareness theory one step further in her book Lucky by Design, published this month McGraw Hill: Lucky people recognize opportunity, but have also mastered the ability to exploit it.

British psychologist and author Richard Wiseman teased out the luck factor in a simple study of people who considered themselves either exceptionally lucky or unlucky. Both sets were given a newspaper and asked to determine how many photographs were inside. On average, the lucky people reported back in seconds, while the unlucky folks took several minutes. Why? The lucky people were much more likely to spot a half-page message on page two that said, in two-inch type, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The unlucky people were also likely to miss a second message placed further inside the newspaper. “Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.”

Our research shows that older investors – those age 65 and older - are much more likely to credit their success to luck. Does this suggest humility is a virtue more aligned with the Greatest Generation? More than two-thirds of seniors with $5 million to $25 million, say being in the right place at the right time was a key factor in building their wealth. More than 60 percent say luck helped them acquire their fortunes. High net worth investors age 54 and younger are less likely to credit luck (45 percent) or being in the right place at the right time (55 percent).

At risk of offending Lady Luck, I feel compelled to add that while affluent investors feel luck is vital to success, they place even more importance on hard work and education. So, if you aspire to join a group I’ll call the Lucky Rich People Club, be humble and self aware, and then get an education and work hard. As the saying goes, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”