Are You Lucky?

I did a lot of recruiting when I was at Lehman Brothers. For a while, I was on the Dartmouth recruiting team, and I’d have to take these flights up to Hanover, New Hampshire on a lawn dart. On more than one occasion I thought we were going to die on the final approach, the plane rattling wildly during the descent through the dark clouds.

I ended up interviewing dozens of people, from Dartmouth and elsewhere, while I was at Lehman. Interviewing people is hard work—it is mentally draining and takes a lot out of you. But here is the thing about interviewing people at an investment bank: they’re all outstanding candidates. They’re all high achievers. They all have 4.0s, they all have super-high SAT scores, they all did sports and activities, and it seemed as though I was interviewing the same people over and over again. It was indescribably tedious.

I thought about it—what could be one question that I would ask that would differentiate these kids that were all close facsimiles of each other?

So I started asking them: “Are you lucky?”

Notice I didn’t ask, “Do you think you’re lucky?” I asked, point-blank, “Are you lucky?” Because I wanted to hire people who were actually lucky. You don’t want unlucky people trading stocks and bonds.

This raises all sorts of questions. For example, do you believe in the existence of luck in the first place? What is luck? Luck is when good things happen to you more often than they happen to other people. It certainly was true with me. From a trading standpoint, errors nearly always went in my favor. I probably made about $300,000 in errors during my time at Lehman. I sat next to a guy whose errors always went against him. He has also had a lot of bad luck in his personal life, too. One thing after another. That period of time at Lehman Brothers, when I was trading index arbitrage, endowed me with a belief that there is such a thing as luck, and it plays a huge role in people’s lives. Some people have it, and some people don’t.

So I was really asking from an existential standpoint whether these kids were lucky. Usually what would happen is that I would ask, “Are you lucky?” And they would answer, “Well, I think I’m lucky…” and I would correct them and say, “No, I didn’t ask if you thought you were lucky, I asked if you are lucky.” At this point they would be totally stuck, trying to figure out the answer that I was looking for, and trying not to bomb out of the interview. 90% of the interviews went this way. I did have an applicant say that he had bad luck. That was the wrong answer—I didn’t push him through to the next round, because I didn’t want to work with unlucky people. One young woman got it right—she said, ‘You know what, I am lucky,” and she went on to list all the good things that had happened to her in life that made her lucky. I had been waiting years for that answer.

I hired her. Unfortunately, the year was 2008. Maybe not so lucky.

I am so lucky it should be illegal—in every aspect of my life. Here’s the big obvious one: getting hired on Wall Street, coming out of the Coast Guard and a third-tier business school. It was a one-in-a-million shot. Yes, I’m smarter than your average bear, and I’m obviously more ambitious, and investment banks do like hiring people that are smart and ambitious, but investment banks just don’t hire anyone from outside of a group of ten or so Ivy League schools. They never do it. When I started at Lehman, they took everyone from my associate class and put our resumes in a binder. I was able to page through the binder and see who my competition was. Harvard. Wharton. Kellogg. I didn’t stand a chance. There was no rational reason why Lehman should have hired me—and they did. And the irony is that I outlasted all of them. At the time, I didn’t really understand how long the odds were. If I did, I probably would have given up right then and there. But I truly believed I had a shot. And look what happened.

There are only about 300-500 major books published in a given year by the Big Five publishers. Mine was one of them. Think of the complex, highly improbable series of events that had to happen in order to make that possible. First of all, I was writing market commentary at Lehman—nobody asked me to do that. Someone was forwarding my market commentary to a literary agent. Lehman went bankrupt, and the literary agent approached me about writing a book about Lehman. I actually told the literary agent to beat it. Six months later, he came back to me and pressed me on it again. When I reflect on it, it’s just incredible. What were the chances? And shit like this happens over and over again in my life.

Those are two examples, but I have hundreds more. Spoiler alert: the last chapter of All the Evil of This World is very autobiographical. It’s about a hedge fund manager, the luckiest person in the world, a guy who can’t lose money even if he tried. He had an existential crisis because he kept getting lucky over and over again and didn’t feel like he deserved it. I’ve been there. Being this lucky is actually a bit disquieting—after a while, you start to think that you’ve actually been chosen for something or there is some divine being looking out for you. I will go ahead and say it: being this lucky has actually made me suicidal. There is no possible way that I deserve all the incredible things that have happened in my life. After a while, I learned to just accept it.

So is this luck, or is there something else at play here? I am lucky, for sure, but I am a big believer in the idea that I make my own luck. I put myself into positions where I am positively exposed to luck. People refer to this as “putting yourself out there.” For example, I wouldn’t have gotten hired on Wall Street if I just stayed at home, wished for it, and took no action. I wouldn’t have been noticed by a literary agent if I hadn’t been spraying content all over the internet. Justin Bieber became a star on the basis of a YouTube video. I don’t imagine that he was expecting to be discovered, that anyone would watch his video outside of some family and friends, but he put himself out there, and the rest is history. For sure, there are some people who toil in anonymity for years with nothing to show for it. Maybe they aren’t very good. Maybe they’re not very lucky. I am a firm believer in the idea that if you are a creator of some kind, a writer, a musician, or an artist, if you keep putting in the hours, one day, good things will happen.

Part of this is taking risk. In the case of applying for a job on Wall Street, what was the risk? The only risk was rejection, and the price of a few plane tickets. That was the only downside. If I spent all that time and effort looking for a job, I’d be out some time and effort, but no worse off financially. It was a bet with limited downside and lots of upside. Luck will never find you in your apartment. It’s funny—the way kids look for jobs on Wall Street now is to look people up on LinkedIn and send about 2,000 cold emails. I was cold calling people and setting up informational interviews and flying across the country for meetings. The guy who interviewed me first is still a great friend of mine to this day. If you want to be lucky, always take a meeting, always go to conferences, always go to parties, always put yourself in the middle of people. You never know what amazing opportunities will present themselves.

So I ask you: are you lucky? Whether or not luck exists, if you really believe that you are lucky, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to be lucky. I believe in the power of the human mind to create positive or negative experiences. Our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions become our destiny. Or something like that. I read that on Facebook.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music recommendation: Gareth Emery – Long Way Home. I should have been a trance DJ. It looks like so much fun. This one really is great for long drives.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.