I come up with my best business ideas when I FART first.
FARTing helps me make strong, meaningful decisions that move my business forward instead of chasing at any new opportunity that comes my way, wasting my time on fruitless schemes.
No, I’m not talking about flatulence; though I do enjoy the subject mainly because of I have a 6th grader’s sense of humor.
I’m talking about FARTing as an acronym for a creative process.
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.”
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.
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?
When you’re on fire with the hope of striking it right on some investment, remember to consider not just how much you will make if you are right but how much you will lose if you are wrong.
In what’s known as “Pascal’s Wager,” the mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal provided a model for how to think about this problem.
Now I’m actually not a very religious person, but I’ve always liked the following example.
Since God’s existence is a matter of faith, not scientific proof, how should you live? Let’s say you gamble that God exists, so you lead a virtuous life – but it turns out there is no God. You miss enjoying a few sins while you are alive, but that’s all your gamble costs you. Now let’s say you gamble that there is no God and sin your way through life without a qualm – and it turns out that God does exist. The payoff on this gamble is a few decades of cheap thrills – then an eternity burning in Hell.
Pascal’s Wager shows that whether you should take a risk depends not just on the probability that you are right but also on the consequences if you are wrong.
Moral of the story? To make reliably good decisions, you must always weight how right you think you are against how sorry you will be if you turn out to be mistaken.
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