aging partner at Salomon Brothers. Im-
pressed by the young grad student, she
convinced her husband to give him a job.
This allowed Lewis to become a house de-
rivatives expert. From what he picked up
on the job, he penned his 1989 best-selling
book Liar’s Poker about the boastfulness
and deceit rife in Wall Street.
“What were the odds of being seated at
that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers
lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street
firm to write the story of the age? Of land-
ing in the seat with the best view of the
business?” Lewis told Princeton Univer-
sity’s graduating class in 2012. “This isn’t
just false humility. It’s false humility with
a point. My case illustrates how success is
always rationalized. People really don’t like
to hear success explained away as luck—
especially successful people. As they age,
and succeed, people feel their success was
somehow inevitable.” Author E.B. White
succinctly observed the same thing in a
1944 column for Harper’s Magazine: “Luck
is not something you can mention in the
presence of self-made men.”
But don’t bet it all on fickle odds. Work
and diligence are essential. Peter Drucker,
the founder of modern management—who
luckily fled Nazi Germany in 1933—noted
in his Managing for Results: “Luck, chance
and catastrophe affect business as they do
all human endeavors. But luck never built
a business. Prosperity and growth come
only to the business that systematically
finds and exploits its potential.”
Even so, keep your eyes and ears open,
for you never know when the stars and the
cosmos might align. That’s what happened
to Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, radio
astronomers working at Bell Labs in Holm-
del, N.J. In 1964 the pair were attempting
to map signals in the Milky Way, and they
couldn’t figure out the cause of an odd
buzzing noise picked up by their equip-
ment. As they worked to get rid of the
static—including removing pigeons that
had nested in their 20-foot horn-shaped
antenna—they realized they weren’t re-
ceiving random sounds but cosmic mi-
crowave background, the thermal echo of
the Big Bang, an event that created the uni-
verse. For confirming the start of space and
time, Wilson and Penzias won the Nobel
Prize in Physics. Those pesky pigeons
helped make them a pair of lucky ducks. •△
Workaholic and
lucky inventor
Thomas Edison
conducted
experiments in
his New Jersey
laboratory in 1910.