The Better Letter: Lucky and Good
It's better to be lucky than good but best to be both.
In December of 1977, I bought Jackson Browne’s just-released album, Running on Empty, at my local record shop. I paid $4.99, $1 off the regular album price because it was brand new. JB played the title song from that album Monday evening here in San Diego, at the close of his set during his concert with James Taylor.
On August 15, 1982, my lovely bride and I saw JT in concert for the first time. It was in Nashville, Tennessee. Then, as Monday, he was terrific. By my memory, these concerts shared at least nine great songs, including this one.
Monday was a happy, fun evening. But we live in an angry, aggrieved time. Mona Charen said it well.
“I sense that people’s anger makes them feel alive and gives them a much-needed sense of community. If you hate together, you’re at least together, right? People are too damn atomized. America’s families [and churches] have been in decline for decades, which has weakened communities, and localism generally. The internet has further isolated us, freeing our ids while starving our hearts.”
There was none of that Monday – just three-and-a-half hours of great music. I was particularly struck by how music brought a sold-out arena of strangers with nothing obviously in common together, singing songs of joy and peace in unison. Churches have understood the power of singing together for two millennia. May we see (and hear) more of it. I was lucky to be there.
Oh, and I got my Moderna booster this week. I am most grateful and lucky indeed.
This week’s TBL features an idea from the wonderful Christine Benz of Morningstar. Thank you, Christine.
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Thank you for reading.
Lucky and Good
The Atlanta Braves won the World Series this week, defeating the Houston Astros in six games. As in most human endeavors, there was tremendous skill and lots of luck involved in the achievement.
In Major League Baseball, over a 162-game season, the best teams win roughly 60 percent of the time. That the best teams still lose 40 percent of the time means that there is a lot of randomness in baseball. That idea makes intuitive sense – the difference between ball four and strike three can be tantalizingly small (even if/when the umpire gets the call right). So can the difference between a hit and an out.
Still, the best performing teams usually prevail over a 162-game season. Thus, the baseball statistic that best predicts team wins (Wins Above Replacement) predicts over 80 percent of the variance in team win totals during the regular season. Accordingly, ten of the top eleven MLB teams in WAR made the postseason this year. Toronto was the outlier. The Blue Jays were very unlucky. They had the third best WAR total, behind only the Dodgers and the Giants, and missed the postseason.
Over the course of a full season, the standings are a pretty fair reflection of how good teams are (or, at least, how well they performed). However, WAR predicts just 6 percent of the variance in postseason wins, and it’s the only single stat that has a meaningful correlation with postseason wins. That’s why there is so much “playoff randomness” in baseball’s postseason.
The Astros were a much better team than Atlanta, and so were the Dodgers, but the Braves beat them both. Over a short series, getting hot mattered more than team skill.
When Atlanta starting pitcher Charlie Morton (whose 2021 WAR was an excellent 4.2) broke his leg in the first inning of the first game, Lady Luck didn’t seem to be with the Braves. But things turned out … differently. The Astros scored more runs than any team in the majors during the regular season, for example, yet were outhomered, 3-2, by the Series MVP, Braves designated hitter Jorge Soler (11-2 overall), and outscored by the Braves, just ninth in runs scored over the 162-game season. In fact, Soler the MVP was -0.4 WAR for the season, if a bit better after Atlanta acquired him mid-season.
This balance between skill and luck was on my mind when I saw this interesting thread.
When asked for a one-word answer for what prevents most people from building wealth, most of the answers related generally to skill – or at least to matters that one can control, like spending, decisions, behavior, impatience, and oneself. Many fewer answers related to luck: words like parents, (family) wealth, and location. When you invest is much more important than how. Our failure to value randomness sufficiently is entirely consistent with our troublesome and utterly human tendency to attribute poor results to bad luck and good results to skill.
As Cambridge’s John Rapley shows, “economists who’ve actually worked out scientifically what contribution our own initiative plays in our success have found it to occupy an infinitesimally small share: the vast majority of what makes us rich or not comes down to pure dumb luck, and in particular, being born in the right place and at the right time.”
Authors like Tolstoy, Churchill, and Solzhenitsyn recognized that war is far more random, contingent and chaotic than we assume and as portrayed in historical narratives. As one combat veteran explained, “You realize there’s no rhyme or reason to why some guy gets hurt and another doesn’t, some guy lives and another doesn’t . . . There are enough gun fights and enough things blowing up and people are going to get hurt. That’s just how it goes.”
Steve Jobs’ life would have been pretty different had he been born into a Bengali peasant family.*
Many of the world’s outcomes (and many of our own) are out of our control. And that’s a problem that all the data in the world won’t fix.
The choices we make bring us closer to life or death, to success or failure. Even small, seemingly insignificant, random choices matter. For good. Or for ill.
The clerk is free to make his call, and the ruthless killer Anton Chigurh is free to do with that call as he pleases. But luck has a say, too. Or maybe it’s grace. The difference between and among the truly random, serendipity, epiphany, and the determined is largely unknowable.
Randomness may not always bat last, but it always gets its hacks.
In Born to Win, Schooled to Lose, researchers found that being born “affluent” but dim carries a 7 in 10 chance of reaching a high socioeconomic status as an adult, while being born intelligent but “disadvantaged” means just a 3-in-10 shot. Talent is universal; opportunity is not.
For decades, a majority of Americans have been able to climb the economic ladder by earning higher incomes than their parents. This upward mobility is key to the American Dream. However, each consecutive generation since World War II has found it harder to make this ascent.
Overall, 90 percent of people born in 1940 ended up richer than their parents, compared to only 40 percent of those born in the 1980s. One’s environment matters a great deal to future success. It’s the sum total of the education, investments, and neighborhood that one’s parents provide. About 30 percent of households can expect to receive a wealth transfer that will account for around 40 percent of their net worth, for example.
Race matters, too. Start-up capital is the most important factor in whether a new venture will be successful and Black entrepreneurs are more likely to be turned down for a loan than similarly-qualified white counterparts.
We like to think that education is the “great equalizer,” and it can be. But it is less true than we like to think. The median family income of a student from Duke (where I went to law school), for example, is $186,700, and 69 percent of students come from the top quintile in terms of wealth. Only about 1.6 percent of students at Duke came from a poor family but became a rich adult.
The instability and psychological havoc created by broken homes are also terrible for child development, especially for boys. “[C]hildhood instability has much a stronger effect than parental socioeconomic status for a variety of important outcomes, including education.” A poor home life (which kids can’t control) has a huge say in one’s success.
We love to think we’re in charge of things…
…and that personal skill drives our achievement.
As if.
There are an estimated 97 million songs built off of just 12 notes, but less than one percent of those songs resonate while the rest live in oblivion. Some of the oblivion songs are great. Many of the resonating songs are mediocre. Some of the resonating songs are truly dreadful.
Incredibly lucky to have survived World War II and the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, Kurt Vonnegut became a literary icon.
The Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s favorite formula relates to luck and skill: “My favorite formula was about success, and I wrote success equals talent plus luck and great success equals talent plus a lot of luck.” Moreover, “Talent is necessary but it’s not sufficient, so whenever there is significant success, you can be sure that there has been a fair amount of luck.”
No successful person likes to hear that.
The reality is that luck (and, if you have a spiritual bent, grace) plays an enormous role in our lives – both good and bad – just as luck plays an enormous role in many specific endeavors, from baseball to investing to poker to winning a Nobel Prize. If we’re honest, we will recognize that many of the best things in our lives required absolutely nothing of us and what we count as our greatest achievements usually required great effort, skill, and even more luck.
If each of us were more aware of the importance of luck to our successes, the more humble and kind we would be. For most things in life, it is better to be lucky than good. It’s best of all to be lucky and good.
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* As a consequence, in all probabilistic fields, the best performers dwell on process. This is true for great investors, great poker players, and great athletes. A great hitter focuses upon a good approach, his mechanics, being selective, and hitting the ball hard. If he does that – maintains a good process – he will make outs sometimes (even when he hits the ball hard) but the hits will take care of themselves. Maintaining good process is really hard to do psychologically, emotionally, and organizationally. But it is absolutely imperative for success.
Totally Worth It
Beautiful and true.
When I was a young, big firm lawyer, the associates regularly discussed the “idiot partner rule.” It was the idea that every big firm had at least one idiot partner to provide hope for the young attorneys – to keep them (us) churning out those billable hours in hopes of making partner someday. Pete Davidson exemplifies the “idiot boyfriend rule.” He has dated the likes of Ariana Grande, Phoebe Dynevor, Kim Kardashian, and Kate Beckinsale. Single idiots everywhere should be filled with hope.
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This is by far the best thing I saw this week.
This is the best thing I read this week. The most important. Very important, too. Also important. Also very important. The coolest. The most disgusting. The most bizarre. The most insane. The oddest. The sweetest. The stupidest. The saddest. The smartest. The most heroic. The funniest. The most fascinating. The most disgusting. The best advice. Nice. Twins. Sometimes you should take the call. Dying to own the libs. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Wrong dad.
Please send me your nominees for this space to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or via Twitter (@rpseawright).
In her latest newsletter, Jane Coaston of The New York Times compares sports fandom to political polarization. “My hatred for Michigan State is not sensible,” she writes. “I did not come to it through logical decision making and a firm comprehension of the facts. My hate for Michigan State developed just as my love for Michigan did, naturally, easily, through a change of cities and the formation of lifelong friendships. And my politics are likely very much the same. I am proud of my willingness to be wrong, but I’ve noticed that I have a troubling propensity to excuse my own wrongness in the face of evidence by saying that hey, well, those guys are probably even more wrong than I am. That’s not reason. That’s fandom.”
This week marks 25 years since Eva Cassidy died of melanoma cancer at 33. The story that emerged later – of a prodigeous talent barely recognized in her lifetime, who went on to achieve rapturous posthumous acclaim – has become one of the most dramatic bad news/good news/bad luck tales in pop history. One listen explains why.
Benediction
This week’s benediction is a stunning rendition of The Prayer.
The Spotify play list of TBL music now includes nearly 200 songs and about 13 hours of great music. I urge you to listen … and turn the volume up. Way up.
To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
Thanks for reading.
Issue 87 (November 5, 2021)