Lifestyle
How to Turn Luck Into a Skill
Do you believe in luck?
I don’t.
I read an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day, and one story stood out in particular to me:
On a lovely morning in May 1994, Barnett Helzberg Jr. was walking past the Plaza Hotel in New York City when he heard someone yell, “Mr. Buffett!” Helzberg turned and saw a woman in a red dress talking to a man he recognized as Warren Buffett. Recalls Helzberg: “I walked up to him and said, “I’m Barnett Helzberg of Helzberg Diamonds in Kansas City. I’m a shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway, I really enjoy your annual meetings, and I believe that my company fits your criteria for investments.”
Within weeks of meeting Buffet, the small business owner successfully sold his company to Berkshire Hathaway for an undisclosed price. Afterwards, Helzberg was quoted as saying “my luck is uncanny. The more you believe that you’re lucky, the luckier you are.”
What is Luck?
In a British study, psychologist Richard Wiseman looked at hundreds of folks who describe themselves as very lucky or unlucky. He found that some are indeed luckier than others – and that being lucky is a kind of skill. Wiseman identified several characteristics that lucky people tend to have in common and that help bring them good fortune.
They don’t give up. “Unlucky people collapse under bad luck,” says Wiseman. “Lucky people treat bad luck as a learning experience. An example of this would be Thomas Edison who famously tested thousands of materials, including boxwood and bamboo, as potential filaments for his incandescent lamp. After thousands of iterations, Edison finally discovered that carbonized cotton thread would do the trick. If he had been a quitter, there would be no lightbulb swtiching on over your head when you get a good idea.
They look outward. Lucky people are curious and observant, eager to engage and explore the world around them. In 1946, Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon Corp., walked into a lab where magnetrons, the power tubes at the heart of shortwave radar, were being tested. After a few moments, he had the odd sensation that the candy bar he had in his pocket was melting. Sure enough, it had become a little bag of chocolate and peanut soup. Spencer wasn’t the first engineer this had happend to, but he was the first one who did anything about it. Spencer promptly got a bag of popcorn and put it in front of the magnetron; after that he tried with an egg. Both objects exploded. By seizing on this spurious moment, Spencer had invented the “radar range,” which later became known as the microwave oven.
They look on the bright side. Picture two cars, each occupied by only the driver, colliding head on at high speed. Both cars are totaled. Both drivers walk away without a scratch. The unlucky one wails ,”Oh God, look at my car!” The lucky exclaims, “Thank God I’m alive!” One sees only what went wrong; the other, what went right. Both are holding the same glass, but the one who considers himself lucky sees it as half full, while the one who thinks he is unlucky is convinced it is half empty.
Now imagine what happens next. The driver who feels lucky is so happy to be alive that he shrugs off any setbacks for the rest of the day. He tells everyone that simply surviving is a miracle. Other people are infected by his enthusiasm and congratulate him on his good fortune; their approval makes him feel even luckier.
On the other hand, the driver who considers himself unlucky fixates on anything else that goes wrong, no matter how minor, as yet another sign that the universe is against him. Picking up on his negativity, waitresses dawdle, security guards ask for several forms of ID, checkout clerks don’t even tell him to “have a good day.” By the end of the day, he is sure that he is cursed.
Make Yourself Luckier
Which driver will be a bigger success in life? The question answers itself. Starting from the same point, these two people have driven themselves in opposite directions on the road of luck
As Louis Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind.
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What are your thoughts on luck?
Personal Branding and the Art of Self Promotion
How do you feel about marketing yourself?
Does it feel self-focused, conceited, and arrogant?
Whenever I talk about personal branding, self-promotion – I feel like I’m coming off as shallow. But marketing is a powerful tool for a reason. Corporations spend millions of dollars on marketing to create a brand – associating a product with a certain culture and ideals in order to make the products more desirable to target consumers. As humans, we market ourselves everyday. When you’re interviewing for a new job, you’re selling yourself as the right person for the position. When you’re in a meeting, you’re selling your ideas to your boss. Even when you approach a girl at a bar, you’re selling yourself as a potential mate.
But have you ever sat down and thought to yourself… am I projecting the right brand?
First, a General Overview of Branding
One definition of branding goes something like this: “A brand is the name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one marketer’s product as distinct from those of other marketers.”
Another identifies a brand as “everything associated with the product, including its symbolism and experiences.” This means that branding encompasses the look, feel and utility of the product or service itself, as well as the packaging, advertising, collateral and even the attitudes of the sales people or promoters representing it.
The intention of most companies is to develop their brands meticulously, guiding all of these variables in a specific direction in order to reach their target audience, sales goals and increase the overall brand equity – which is the value that the brand carries with it in the minds of consumers because of these variables.
Personal branding is the process of marketing people and their careers as brands. While a lot of self help books promote self-improvement, the personal branding concept suggests that success comes from improved self-packaging. Personal branding can include a number of different factors, such as: the body, clothing, appearance and knowledge contained within, all leading to an indelible impression that is uniquely distinguishable.
A real life example can be seen in celebrity real-estate mogul Donald Trump. He uses his last name extensively on buildings and other products he endorses (e.g., Trump Steaks). This associates the “Trump” brand with an assortment of new products all conveying a certain prestige, socioeconomic status, and glamour.
What is Personal Branding?
Personal branding involves managing your reputation, style, look, attitude and skill set the same way that a marketing team would run the brand for a bag of Doritos or bottle of shampoo.The idea is that you can develop a collection of symbols and associations with yourself, granting your name, face and work the same benefits that companies with solid brand equity (like Coca-Cola or Apple) enjoys.
Basically it’s making yourself known for what you want to be known for.
Why Do You Need a Personal Brand?
There are many reasons you should want to develop a personal brand. Building a positive reputation (whatever that might mean in your field) can lead to increased word-of-mouth advertising for you and your services. When your reputation spreads and precedes you, it also makes interactions with potential clients that much easier, allowing you to spend less time convincing them to hire you, and more time negotiating the scope of services and payment (and actually working on the project).
Managing a personal brand helps you build a kind of brand equity, which will grant your name and products a certain star power. This associative celebrity can aid you in future projects you may wish to undertake, allow you to easily segue into alternate-but-related fields and will grant you expert status within your current field.
By recognizing and optimizing your personal brand, you will become part of and associated with specific ideas, movements, aesthetics, cultural attitudes and people. The more you refine your brand, the more targeted your message becomes and the more you will be doing the work you want to do, with the people you want to be working with, and at a price point that everyone can agree on.
And those are just the short-term benefits. In the long run, taking the time to sharpen your focus and think through what kind of professional you want to be and how you want the rest of the world to see you can actually make you a much more skilled, fulfilled, and happy person.
It was Abe Lincoln who said, “I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”
Developing Brand “You”
Rather than outline all of the details in a ridiculously long blog post, I’m making the word document on personal branding that I put together available for download. This was originally written for my personal reference. It lists all of the essential question that I believe you need to ask yourself in order to develop a strong personal brand. I’m offering it here as a free download, no opt-in required. Take a gander at the word doc, do some contemplative thinking, ask your friends for some second opinions, and let me know what conclusions you’ve reached. I’d love to compare notes.
Click Here to Download My FREE Personal Branding Template
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Have you had any good experiences with personal branding?
Disproportionate Returns and How to be a Winner
Disproportionate returns describes situations where everyone else is so horrible that, by being even half-decent, you can dominate everyone else and win.
Here’s a case study from my friend Kenneth, who crushed a “Best Man” speech by doing just a little bit more than everyone else. With just marginally more work than other speakers, he distinguished himself from the million other crappy best man speeches that happen at every other wedding.
Best Man Speech Winning
“Back in April a friend of mine from college asked me to be the best man at his wedding. I had never done this before but I said yes. The wedding was this past Saturday and when I finished my toast the wedding singer took the mic from me and said “No notes, no cheat sheet and that was one of the best toasts I’ve ever heard.” I got a lot of compliments for a brief, ~250 word speech.
After my buddy asked me to be the best man I went to trusty google and researched best man toasts. They were all crap. They all used the same jokes and the speeches were showing off how clever the best man was, not talking up the groom.
I broke up my speech into five parts…
I wrote out my speech in about half an hour one day during a break from studying for my professional engineering exam. Before I ever started writing it I thought a lot about what I wanted to say. I thought about it in the shower, on the way to and from work (sometimes at work). It wasn’t always my top thought but it was often in the background.
After writing my speech I left it alone and then opened up the text file just over a week before the wedding. I read through it, made some changes and printed it off. I took the speech with me as I traveled for work the entire week prior to the wedding.
Note: I especially love his last mile magic. 99% of people will not take this step, but it’s what separates people from being just pretty good to jaw dropping outstanding.
The morning of the wedding I spent 30-40 mins walking around the living room giving my speech to the dog without my text. When I slipped up I started over and I tried to keep my pace the same as how I wanted to do it in front of the audience.
Throughout the day if I had a moment I ran through the text in my head. I had no choice to remember it as I purposely left the speech back in the room. All told, I think I spent about two hours working on that speech over the course of seven months, including 30 mins of practice the morning of the wedding. The result of which was a lot of “that was the best toast I have ever heard at a wedding” compliments. I thought it was going to be just ok as I had not spent a lot of time on it but compared to everyone else, my little bit of work went a long, long way.”
Other Low Hanging Fruit for Being Awesome
Let’s take some examples where everyone else is so terrible that you can dominate by being even somewhat competent.
- Negotiations. Most people are awful negotiators (especially for jobs and especially in America). That’s because nobody teaches us how to negotiate — indeed, we’re actively taught that it’s “weird” and “awkward” to negotiate. By contrast, I find it “weird” to lose $10,000 because you didn’t take 5 hours to practice your negotiating pitch beforehand. By simply starting a negotiation, you stand out from 80% of other applicants.
- Writing effective emails. Most people send out dozens of emails per day. Yet when was the last time they studied the best emailers to learn techniques to (1) get busy people to respond to them, (2) cut down on back-and-forth emails, and (3) get what they wanted via email?
- Conferences. Most conferences are boring and bad. But so are most conference go-ers, who don’t do their homework beforehand, eat with their co-worker, and miss the prime benefits of networking. (The book Never Eat Alone has a magical chapter on how to be a master networker at conferences.)
- Exercise. Go for a 30-minute run every day and you’ll be in better shape than 90% of adult Americans. Stop debating minutiae about health and get off your ass.
- Holding onto expensive purchases for years (even decades). We love to buy expensive things like houses and cars, then turn around and sell them 5 years later. This is literally one of the most poisonous financial decisions you can make: Not only do you incur huge transaction costs, but you condition yourself to think that buying and selling expensive goods every few years is normal.
- Earning money online. As Erica Douglass recently said, “If you earn $1 online, you’re doing better than 90% of people.”
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