In my view, options are the true currency of wealth. The freedom to change direction, take a risk, or (most satisfyingly) simply saying “No”, is worth far more than the number on my portfolio page. Certainly, that number helps, but it’s the options it provides, rather than the number itself, that is best to focus on.
So how can you maximize your options?
I wish I knew of some formula to reliably make that happen, but alas, I don’t. In my own life, it’s clear to me that random luck played an outsized influence in compounding my options. One, I was born an American. Two, I was raised within a stable marriage. Three, scholarships allowed me to receive an excellent education. I clearly benefitted from opportunities I did not create and could not have earned in advance.
So am I saying that one way to maximize your opportunities it to just “be lucky”?
YES!
Simple, right? But usually, there is some work involved in being lucky.
There’s luck, and then there’s the persistent work of preparing for luck
Luck is too powerful a force for me to pretend there’s any kind of formula or logic to it. Sure there’s things like card counting and games of chance, but that’s “Game Luck”, or controlled environments with rules where the laws of probability can predict some measure of consistent outcomes.
“Life luck” is an altogether different creature, with way too many variables for anyone to reliably predict the outcomes.
An example of random “Life Luck” happened to me in college. Younger me picked up a random book in the stacks of my library. I don’t remember the title, other that it was rather cheezy, but I was in that kind of mood. The author offered seven principles for approaching life, and though I no longer remember the author’s name, his ideas resonated with me.
I adapted them to fit my own personality and life circumstances. Over time they became something like an internal personal operating system. They helped me process the uncertainty, setbacks, opportunities, and occasional catastrophes that presented themselves randomly into my life.
I was fortunate to absorb these principles before beginning my career: first in the military, then in the Fortune 500, and finally (and most helpfully) in the scrappier and less predictable world of small business.
The 8 Principles of Persistence
These principles have worked in nearly every situation that I’ve found myself in: demanding military situations, million-dollar business situations, and stressful family situations.
They gave me a calm and deliberate framework for making decisions when circumstances were unclear, emotions were running high, and nobody in the room actually knew what was going to happen next. (Of course, this pretty much describes EVERY high-stakes decisions I’ve had to make in my life. Probably yours, too.)
Over the years, I modified the original seven principles, replacing and adding some of my own as blunt experience taught me lessons on how to best deal with the viccisitudes of life. Here is the version I’ve carried with me through the years:
- Accept my situation: See reality as it is, not as I wish it were.
- Take the initiative: Do not wait passively for circumstances or other people to attack the problem or goal.
- Be willing to fail: Failure is learning and the admission price for moving forward in uncertainty.
- Be a professional: Be dependable, control my emotions, and do the work properly.
- Be humble: I understand that I am a product of good luck, not good breeding, so I must respect that.
- Be healthy: While we cannot control our health, we have enormous agency in cultivating it.
- Choose happiness: Enjoy the moment, no matter how joyful or tragic. The act will improve the outcome.
- Let God help me: I am neither omniscient nor entirely in control, but I can act with persistence and discipline. The rest I leave up to God, chance, nature, the universe.
To be clear, these principles did not eliminate failure, prevent bad decisions, or cause the universe to arrange itself to my desires. They simply helped me respond constructively to whatever happened next, whether good luck or bad. In short, they made me ready for luck.
None of this is voodoo. It is just a set of useful behaviors. Practiced persistently, they made me ready to take advantage of good fortune. But maybe more importantly, they also made me ready whenever bad fortune showed up instead.
That willful, persistent readiness is the only part I really had any control over. The luck did the rest, and I don’t get to take credit for it.
But readiness is what let me support a family on a single income, survive my own dumb mistakes, and recognize potential opportunities that I might have otherwise glided obliviously past. It’s what put me here at age 56 with something more valuable than money: OPTIONS.
I’m not promising you the same outcome. Nobody can, nobody should. But readiness is available to anyone willing to practice it, and it costs nothing but your persistence.