Continuing with Success and Luck today, Frank proposes three laws of luck in the book.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="01" > luck can be added</h1>
Whoever has it shall be added to him, and he shall be made rich, and whatever he has not shall be taken away from him. - The Gospel of Matthew
Last month, a divorce news brought bill Gates, the former world's richest man, back to the public. As a result, the world's richest man has been consumed by various media. With an academic attitude, we should go back decades and study why Gates created Microsoft.
For such a huge success as becoming the world's richest man, no one can ignore Gates's extraordinary talent and extraordinary efforts. But how important luck is to success is, the world's richest man certainly knows.
Malcolm Gladwell described Gates' luck in The Outlier.
Gates was fortunate to grow up in a privileged family, his father was a well-known lawyer in Seattle, and his mother was a wealthy banker. In seventh grade, Gates transferred from public school to Seattle Lakeside School, a private high school for the children of wealthy families.
Lakeside School is special in that it had a time-sharing system computer terminal that was rare in the world in 1968. In those days, when the vast majority of students were learning to program, packages did not have an instant feedback system. The time-sharing system can process the program submitted by the programmer in a timely manner and provide timely feedback. While the vast majority of eighth-graders in the world were still honestly studying school lessons, eighth-grade Gates was lucky enough to learn computer programming through a time-sharing system.
Not only that, but while learning programming, Gates was lucky enough to find opportunities to practice. He started with a C-Cubed test program run by a parent of a classmate. C-Cubed went out of business and Gates found ISI, an information technology company that needed to write corporate payroll management software. Later, when a technology company called TRW was in urgent need of recruiting professional software programmers, Gates was once again lucky enough to get the opportunity to work at TRW. While working at TRW, Gates wrote programs under the direction of a man named John Norton. And this guy taught Gates more programming than anyone else.
Gates later said:
There can't be more than 50 people in the world like me, I've worked for C-Cubed, I've written payroll programs, and then I've worked for TRW — all in one. I think I had a much deeper understanding of software development at a very young age than my peers. All that I've gained is a collection of incredible luck.
If luck can be added, gates' luck is clearly more than that. Gates has had good luck since he was born in 1955. Because the beginning of the personal computer era was in 1975, Gates founded Microsoft in 1975.
If Gates had been born ten years earlier, by 1975, he would not only have missed the golden age of learning to code, but might have found a job, bought a house, and then married and had children by the time he was 30, it would have been extremely difficult for him to make the decision to start a business. Similarly, if Gates had been born ten years late and he was only 15 years old by 1975, Gates, still in high school, would certainly not have been able to catch up with the PC outbreak.
Also, when Gates retired from Harvard to start Microsoft in 1975, Lady Luck still cared for him.
In 1980, IBM wanted to develop a new personal computer operating system, so it went to Gates. Gates didn't realize the significance of the project at first, and not only did he not take it, but he also recommended other software companies to IBM. In the midst of the yin and yang, QDOS appeared. Fortunately, IBM didn't realize the importance of QDOS either. Later, at the recommendation of Paul Allen, Gates bought QDOS for about $50,000, which was renamed MS-DOS after modifying it.
Even more fortunately, because IBM predicted that the market for personal computers was very limited, it reached an agreement with Microsoft to charge copyright fees from every IBM personal computer that used this operating system. It is the right to charge royalties to each operating system that Microsoft has the largest source of revenue and profit.
Without so much good luck accumulating on Gates, he probably would never have achieved such great success.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="02" > luck can be amplified</h1>
Why do people with similar abilities and educational backgrounds who are equally hardworking have very different incomes?
Traditional research holds that people's income differences are mainly caused by differences in "human capital", that is, personal characteristics such as intelligence, education, experience, and social skills. That is, the difference in an individual's income is directly proportional to the difference in human capital.
Today, it seems that this view faces some unexplainable problems. In the 1980s, CEOs of large U.S. companies were paid 42 times as much as the average worker, and now they are more than 400 times the average worker. Just a few decades later, does that mean that these CEOs are ten times more capable of intelligence, education, experience, and social skills than the average employee? In fact, the slow pace of human evolution often requires millennia to discern differences. The distribution of intelligence and experience among individual human beings has hardly changed much over the past few decades.
So what is causing the income gap to widen? The answer is that the information revolution and new technologies provide enormous leverage for the most capable people, with the help of which they are able to multiply or even tens of times their income.
A very small number of people have also accumulated great wealth for themselves in the process of rapidly creating value by creating their own start-up companies. Some CEOs can also achieve huge revenue growth with the help of the company's platform. For these people, their ability to earn hundreds of times more than others is obviously not attributable to their abilities alone, but also because of luck that makes them successful entrepreneurs or CEOs of companies.
In the information age, the amplification of luck is also manifested as winner-take-all.
In general, there are two general characteristics of winner-take-all. One characteristic is that the rewards tend to be highly concentrated in the hands of a few top players. The travel industry is left with Didi, the group buying industry only has the Us group and Hungry, and even the self-media and live broadcast with goods are the same.
Another feature is that returns depend on relative strength rather than absolute strength. One of the best women's tennis players of all time, Stefi Graf, played at a high level throughout the 1990s, but her real income peaked in the 12 months after April 1993. One reason for this was that her opponent, Monica Cerles, was forced to withdraw from the tour after being stabbed in the back by a crazy fan after a match in April of that year.
According to the economist Schaeven Rosen, the music industry is a typical winner-take-all industry. First-rate performers are rare and have high incomes, and their incomes are very different from those of second-class actors. The fact is that when most listeners listen blindly, they basically cannot find the nuances of the level of performance of the two.
So, how did the winner-take-all phenomenon come about? The answer is through network effects.
The so-called network effect refers to the fact that the value of a product increases as the number of consumers who purchase such a product and its compatible products increases.
Once, Microsoft's Windows operating system was on par with rival Apple's Mac operating system. But because Windows has more users than Macs, software development companies will prioritize the Windows platform when developing new software, after all, more users mean more sales and lower costs. As a result, Windows users can use more software, so more users choose Windows, and the resulting network effect forms a positive feedback loop. Later, everyone knows that Windows occupies almost all the world's personal computers.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="03" > the more competitive it is, the more important your luck is</h1>
The more competitive the event, the more people will participate in the competition, and the more people will be close to the highest level. In fact, at the level of the top master, it is difficult for everyone to significantly improve their ability, and luck will have a decisive impact on victory or defeat at this time.
Downwinds and headwinds
"Everything is ready, only the East Wind is owed." When we look at the story, we roughly understand the role of the wind direction on the outcome of a battle. In fact, the role of the wind direction is clearly not limited to fighting wars. In world-class athletics, wind direction is also quite important.
In athletics, to achieve the highest level of athletic achievement, you need to break the world record. To break the world record, athletes need not only talent, years of deliberate training, but also a little bit of luck that determines success or failure when competing. This little bit of luck is the direction of the wind.
Due to the 100m short circuit, men's 110m hurdles, long jump and triple jump results will be affected by downwinds or reverses. Therefore, the governing body of the athletics competition stipulates that if the wind speed of the athlete when competing downwind exceeds 2 m/s, even if the record is broken, it is considered invalid.
So, how big is the wind speed of 2 m/s? Check the "Wind Level Table" to know that 2 meters / second is a level 2 wind, the human face feels the wind, the leaves are slightly ringing, also called the Japanese wind. Even such a small wind, for the world-class track and field competition, but it plays a decisive role in the outcome.
Frank mentions in the book that of the 8 current world records in athletics, 7 occurred in the case of a downwind, and none of them were headwinds. Meanwhile, seven of the last world record holders in these 8 sports were also downwinds when they broke the record, with the only exception being the men's 100 meters, when it was neither headwind nor downwind.
Breaking Bad
In the highly competitive field of show business, it's almost impossible to succeed without luck. The same is true of Brian Cranston, who became popular a few years ago with the American drama "Breaking Bad".
As early as 2005, the script of "Breaking Bad" was rejected by many television stations. By 2008, Hollywood screenwriters went on strike for higher wages, giving Breaking Bad producer Vince Gilligan time to craft the script.
When Gilligan suggested that Cranston play the male lead, Cranston was just a middle-aged, unknown supporting actor.
At first, studio executives were reluctant to invest heavily in an actor who had never played a leading role, and they planned to give the male number one to John Cusack (the star of the classic sci-fi disaster film 2012). After Cusack refused, they went to Matthew Broderick (who played the first Godzilla), and Broderick refused.
In this way, in the case of other big names who are reluctant to star, Cranston finally waited for the favor of the goddess of luck. "Breaking Bad" starred in "Breaking Bad" that made Cranston win an Emmy Award four times, and he became a highly sought after actor in the film and television industry. While no one denies that he's a talented actor, in a showbiz world so competitive, if the above series of events happens randomly, Cranston may be just a thousand ordinary actors who are as talented as he is, but still struggling to make a name for themselves.
In fact, Cranston has a clear understanding of his good fortune, he once said: "Luck is an element that most people in the art field sometimes don't want to admit—you can have talent, perseverance, patience, but without luck, there will be no successful career." 」 ”