That's why we need to focus on real world skills like "being clutch".

let warren buffet have alcoholic parents or grow up in the slums of lagos or wherever and see how far he makes it.

He'd probably be far more successful than the average person in those circumstances. The idea that bad circumstances negate talent, or that the only people who rise from bad circumstances to a higher social level is completely ridiculous. While someone growing up in some African slum has virtually no chance at attaining even a moderate level of success by American standards, they still have the chance to be a local gang leader, run arms, or become the leader of a pirate gang. I'm uncertain what some people are saying with regard to luck here, it is certainly not the cause of disparate results in all circumstances.

+1

and the author's 2nd book is just terrible.

you think he d make a local gang leader? i mean being smart would probably help but i d think becoming a gang leader would require a somewhat different skillset than becoming a successful investor. i d think that physical attributes, aggression, ruthlessness e.g. might be much more important etc.
you could also look at basically every sports star anywhere and ask what would happen if they started playing their sport 2 years later, prly 90% wouldnt make in anywhere.
it would certainly be interesting to get results for seperated twin on the circumstances matter, i mean they are essentially the same from the start.

I don't know enough about third-world countries or about Buffet to get into details but yes generally people that are successful in X environment will be still be successful in a different environment although the degree of success and the metrics used to measure success will be different. At a very basic level there are only two qualities that matter to being successful -- the ability to see how to get from A to B and the ability to adapt yourself so that you have the skills/qualities required to get from A to B.

I think it's a mistake to say something like "Buffet would have had strong relative success if he grew up in the slums of Africa".

Different environments require different skill sets. If you're in a relatively lawless and corrupt environment, being tough and amoral are more important traits than analytical intelligence. The people who rise well above their starting status in those countries are often more-or-less gangsters. The "legal elite" in those countries are born into it, it's a matter of caste (see Mexico for example -the normal social elites are visibly of a different genetic background than everyone else.)

[Wow just noticed the guy above me is saying the same thing.]

Anyway this just gets you into excessive speculation.



Another big source of luck that nobody is mentioning is people who pursue their passions but happen to live in a time in which their passions are highly valued by the marketplace.

Classic example for me is Shawn Fanning the Napster guy. He's a 19 year-old in his dorm writing a nifty program to share music, not plotting his lifeplan to become a 100-millionaire.

Fortunately for him he's doing this near the peak of the dot.com frenzy so he's able to sell it for $200 M or something to a company that never makes a profit from it.

Or to look at it another way, imagine some brilliant mathematician in the 50's who loves researching and speculating about computers. What are the chances this guy is going to be mega rich? What are the chances he would have wound up mega rich if he had been born 30 years later?



Luck is in practice very important but it's just not useful to analyze. I think you're best off just excluding the people who are clearly luckboxes (some dot.com flukes, some people who started unforeseeable trends like beanie babies), and otherwise not fretting about it.

Most common trait:


Can disappear for 12 months, come back 1 year later, and their bank account has grown within that time.


Can decide on any given day to stop working completely for however long they decide.


The word "job" has no meaning to their own life.


Freely spends their money as if drinking from a well that never runs dry.

Yes.

The idea that the fictional little black impoverished Buffett is still a preternatural stock dork is a little ridiculous. Sounds like a Final Destination plot. He probably finds a way to arbitrage the illegal gun racket and kills some 7 year old with a machete when 5, garnering the respect of all the 7 year olds and making them his crew.

We're all dealt a hand at birth. The luck of the draw for your starting hand does not change. It is just luck.


How you play that hand is what makes all the difference.


You can be dealt the best starting hand in the world (billionaire loving business parents), yet you can still screw up your entire life.


Arguing luck is completely useless.

100% correct.

No.

The particular points Henry makes about success may or may not be correct, whatever.


But this line:

"People who believe luck is a significant factor are just trying to rationalize their own lack of success by attributing success to a force that is not under their agency."


...is just weak. Certainly many people who note the luck factor do it as a defense mechanism, but plenty of successful people also acknowledge the role of luck in their situations.

It's almost a reverse defense mechanism when you say that "my theory is X and anyone who believes otherwise is just a jealous member of the hoi polloi...unlike me".



The same point came up with Leatherass in some HSNL threads. The guy is super obnoxious and has many detractors but insists that they are all just jealous.

The extension of this logic is that it is impossible to criticize someone who is 'successful' for anything, because you will inevitably be motivated by jealousy.

It isn't a theory. I don't consider outcomes that are not desert based as success -- so becoming rich by winning the powerball / 6-49 doesn't count as success. Removing those you'll find very few success stories are based on luck. The one exception being people who are successful in the entertainment / modelling industry.

I would say this qualifies as a theory:

"What they fail to realize is that in the vast majority of cases if X had not happened Y would have happened and had the same role."



I'm not particularly opposed to this but it doesn't account for some significant subsets of successful people, like those who were pursuing some personal interest that happened to turn out to be extremely lucrative.

Pursuing a personal interest that turns out to be extremely lucrative that wasn't known to have the potential to lucrative beforehand is a pretty rare phenomenon. I actually can't think of a single example so I'm curious if you can give one?

Apple was lucky for the founders who had no money and no assets. The 'other' founder had tangible assets that could have been lost. He chose to cash out his stock before 'luck' could cause him to go bankrupt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wayne

You can't believe in good fortune without believing in bad fortune, they are both sides of the same coin.

To reiterate, the OPs question is "What are the top 5 most common traits of people who have achieved financial freedom?"

I think what OP meant to ask is more along the lines of "what are the five most common personal characteristics / personality traits" of people who have become rich.

However, if read and answered literally, then without a doubt answers such as
1) being born in a 1st world country
2) being born & raised in a stable two parent family
3) being born in a middle to upper economic class household
4) being given a solid education

would all be relevant and in fact probably among the five most common traits of rich people. In fact, one could just as rationally argue that being born white and being born male would be the two most common traits. This would purely be a matter of statistics--are rich people in America primarily white and male or not?

If this was the question being asked then absolutely, luck based on birth bias (where & to whom on was born to) would have to be considered to be a HUGE determining factor in who ends up rich and who doesn't.

However, again, I don't think that's the question OP meant to ask.

^

Yeah. Otherwise this doesn't even elevate to a level of discussion and regresses to "google/lock". The other stuff is far more interesting than pounding the luck table. While it may be true, it doesn't offer an insight on how to improve.

Grunch.

I am financially free, and the #1 trait is luck.

Seriously I am lucky to be where I am, if I bought my business 18 months later I would be out of business, due to the credit markets drying up. Factors well outside of people's control matter far more.

Most successful people display the same traits but there are those who display those same traits and are not successful. Is there really a question as to which traits successful people display? Isn't it obvious?

It depends on how charitable you want to be on "that wasn't known to have the potential to be lucrative", but I think the Napster example fits.

The Lonely Planet Guides is another example off the top of my head. Was started by hippies for hippies with no aspiration of becoming a very profitable business, let alone a publishing empire.

Dungeons & Dragons.

Wite-out. (Meh on second thought just read the wiki story and the woman who invented this seemed rather savvy about it.)

I'm sure tons of inventions were made ad hoc rather than with an eye to being marketed (btw there is a ton of luck in the field of invention, people getting beaten out for patents rights by a week or whatever).

I dunno I suspect there are innumerable examples actually but this is not a topic I have read up on.


Keep in mind this point came up as a response to your argument that successful people would be successful regardless of the particular circumstances they happened to succeed in. So what's relevant is that sometimes people pursue a hobby or interest simply as a labor of love and it turns out to be extremely profitable.

If one day I have enough money to stop working (around like 40-45 years old) and still have enough to play a bunch of sports,send my kids to school, travel at least once a year, have a nice 300k$ house (I don't live in a big city so 300k is pretty damn nice here) and live a middle class life just without the working 8-5 part I'll consider myself rich.

I dont care about BMW's and Mercedes Benz; nor do I care about Armani and Dom Pérignon. That **** is all worthless.

OnWithTheShow, Your friends are psychopaths I wouldn't let them get too close if I were you

agree

Micturition Man

You are confusing not fulling appreciating the value of something with luck. Luck would be spilling something on your hands and discovery Saccharine when you had no intention of doing so. Luck would be having a drug designed to treat hypertension angina pectoris fail but then realizing the subjects all had boners. Going to the airport to pick up your uncle in some insignificant airport and being discovered by Tom Ford because his private jet had to have an emergency landing.

Something like Napster he fully intended to create a file sharing program -- there is no luck involved. He had an idea for a cool way to share files and so wrote some software to implement it. Just because he didn't appropriate that what he was doing would be worth $200M doesn't mean that he lucked into it. He intentionally invented it.