When Lauren Bacall was young, she went out of her way to befriend a large number of people and get involved in a fast flow of events. So did Kirk Douglas. If they had not behaved in that way, we would not know either of their names today.
Talent? Of course they had talent. Also wit, charm, grace, and a lot of other good attributes. But none of it would have done either of them the least bit of good without luck. Their oddly linked stories illustrate with beautiful clarity how men and women find good luck by positioning themselves where events are flowing fastest.
Bacall, born Bacal, was a struggling young actress and model in New York during the early years of World War II. New York is always swarming with such hopefuls. Most are lovely and many are genuinely talented. They all seem to come from remote towns, where they reigned as beauty queens, led the Fourth of July parade and acted in the high school senior play. Now they are in the Big Apple, trying to get the world to pay attention.
Most are doomed to bitter disappointment. For of all those thousands of beautiful and talented young aspirants who pour into the great city each month, only a few can be chosen for national or even local prominence. Those with an obvious lack of talent will of course be rejected rapidly, but that still leaves thousands, tens of thousands. They all have talent and since it cannot be measured, it must be assumed they have it in roughly equal amounts.
What determines success or failure for those young women? How are the few winners chosen? They are chosen by luck. The winners in the huge, eternal, and desperate lottery are those who chance to be in the right place at the right time.
Such was young Lauren Bacall’s happy outcome. Her first couple of years at New York were attended by almost continuous bad luck, according to her autobiography, By Myself. She got bit parts in plays that promptly folded, landed modelling jobs that turned out badly for random reasons. Unconsciously practicing the First Technique, she recognized the back luck for what it was. She saw correctly that the bad outcomes were in no way her fault, and therefore, she might as well go on struggling as long as her stamina lasted.
So she went ahead and applied the Second Technique. This, too, was unconscious on her part. There is no indication in her autobiography that she ever gave serious thought to the principles of luck control. She was simply one of those people who apply most of the principles without thinking about them – and who end up lucky without knowing why.
The commandment of the Second Technique is: Go where events flow fastest. Surround yourself with a churning mass of people and things happening.
Young Lauren Bacall did that without realizing that she was thereby increasing her chances of getting a lucky break, the break without which she could not go anywhere. She did not permit her string of bad luck discourage her. Instead of becoming depressed and inactive – which bad luck can do to people when they believe it is caused by their own flaws – she kept herself oriented to the fast flow. She got busily, almost frantically involved in war-effort work such as the Stage Door Canteen; in part-time jobs such as ushering at theatres; in social events dates, parties, and picnics. She made herself the center of a howling whirlwind of people.
She could not know which of those people would be the conduit through which her break would flow. As it turned out, that destiny-marked person was an obscure English writer named Timothy Brooke. He and Bacall weren’t lovers. He was simply an affable man whose company the gregarious young would-be actress enjoyed. One nigh hey wet to a nightclub named Tony’s. While there, Brooke introduced her to a causal acquaintance of his, a man named Nicolas de Gunzburg. She did not know it at the time, but this was the first link of a long chain of circumstances leading to her big break.
De Gunzburg was an editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Through him, the lucky young actress got to know Diana Vreeland, the magazine’s fashion editor. Vreeland gave her some modeling assignments. One arresting full-page shot caught the attention of a Hollywood producer, Howard Hawks. Lauren Bacall’s movie career was launched.
She was a woman of great grace, beauty, and talent. Those attributes played a necessary part in her climb. She had to have them so that she could take advantage of the big break itself. If she had not gone out of her way to find the fast flow, and if she had not met that obscure British writer as a result, the name Lauren Bacall would mean nothing to us today.
Lauren Bacall seems not to have thought very profoundly about luck. Perhaps this was because she was naturally a lucky personality and, therefore, did not feel any great need to worry about it. She lived life as it came and found most of it enjoyable. But at the time when she was going through her early struggles in New York, hoping for her big break, she met a young man who did spend a good deal of time wondering about the role of luck in his own and others’ lives. His name was Issur Danielovitch, and he came from Amsterdam, New York. He was trying to find work as an actor. His stage name was Kirk Douglas.
Many, many years after those tough times in New York, I interviewed Douglas in his agent’s office in Hollywood. He recalled thinking consciously about fast-flow orientation, though he did not use that term. As an unknown young actor in New York, working at a Schrafft’s restaurant to keep himself from starving, he realized clearly that the break he needed would come to him, if it came at all, through some other person. He could not know who that other person would be. But he could know that his chances of getting a break improved in direct proportion to the number of people he knew.
“If you’re a hermit, nothing ever happens in your life,” he said. “If you’re the opposite of a hermit, things happen.” He was the opposite of a hermit. In his time off from Schrafft’s, he got himself involved in a whirl of people and events. One person he got to know was a young would-be actress named Lauren Bacall.
At the time, it seems highly unlikely that this unknown young woman in the bargain basement clothes could ever be the conduit of special luck for him. She had no power of contacts in high places. If Kirk Douglas had engineered his social life with the cynical goal of meeting the rich and powerful, he would have ignored this Lauren Bacall. But so cynical and narrow-focused an approach isn’t likely to produce good luck. The lucky personality gets to know everybody in sight: the rich and the poor, the famous and the humble, the sociable and even the friendless and the cranky.
We noted in the previous chapter that it is in the nature of luck to bring about fast, profound, unforeseen changes in situations – also in people. This is what happened to the hopeful young actress Kirk Douglas befriended. Her big break came and swept her off to Hollywood. In time, she was able to get some movie industry doors opened for him. Kirk Douglas followed her to stardom in the late 1940s.
Thus was her good luck translated into good luck for him. The whole long chai of circumstances was able to take place because both of them found the fast flow. If either one them had failed to do that, neither Kirk Douglas’s acting talent nor the arresting cleft in his chin would have done him any good. We would not know his name or face today.
Whether you aspire to get into the movies or simply get a higher-paying or more exciting job, the rule is the same. Go where events flow fastest.
Eric Wachtel, a New York management consultant and executive recruiter, has watched literally hundreds of men and women climbing career ladders. In his observation, people who get dead-ended are very often people who allow themselves to become isolated.
“This doesn’t mean you have to be one of those Personality Kids who know everybody in town,” Wachtel says. “We can’t all be the life of the party. Some of us are quieter than others. But we can all go around with a look and attitude that says we want to be friendly. We can stay active. The worst thing you can do is withdraw from the network of friendships and acquaintanceships at home and at work. If you aren’t in the network, nobody is ever going to steer anything your way.”
In the business world as in the movies, the big breaks flow through contacts between people. Not necessarily close friendships, just contacts – sometimes just tenuous ones. The distant engine of fate begins to roll closer when, at the end of a long chain of distant events, A quits her job. It is offered to B, who is interested but who veers off in another direction when his old friend, C, offers him something better. D, an impartial observer of all this, has lunch one day with E and mentions the job openings. It sounds to E as though it might be something that would interest F.
E and F are not bosom buddies. They are casual acquaintances – occasional after-work drinking partners, perhaps, or fellow volunteers in some weekend Girl Scout activities. Neither would put the other on a list of “best friends”. Still, E like F, knows enough about her to guess what kinds of career openings would interest he, and is pleased to be the conduit of a potential break. When F hears about the distant job opening, she goes for it, gets it, and changes her life.
People are sure to be jealous of F. “That lucky so-and-so!” they will say. “Always in the right place at the right time!”
But why is she in the right places at the right times? Because she has made the effort to be in many places at many times. Fate has given her a lucky break, but se has earned it. She has positioned herself for it.
The power of seemingly weak links between people is one of the less well understood phenomena of human society. We know a lot about the strong links – more than we want to know, sometimes. Psychiatrists and psychologists eternally study sex, love, family ties, close friendships (and later in this book, we will study a special kind of friendship call destiny pairing). But what of the weak links? We don’t pay much attention to them, though, they may exert the most profound influences on our lives.
Think of all the people who know you on sight and by name, but whom you would not call “close”. The neighbors you see a few times a year at parties. The woman who cuts your hair. The people down the hall at work. Your youngster’s favorite teacher. The men and women who sing with you in the church choir or worked on last year’s political campaign with you. The list goes on and on. If you are in the fast flow, you should be able to count a hundred of these weak links contacts easily and another hundred or more after a little thought.
A social science team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology once estimated that the average American is directly in contact with as many as five hundred people. This total includes strong as well as weak links, and it also includes extremely flimsy contacts – for example, your nodding acquaintanceship with some of the checkout cashiers at your local supermarket. These people recognize your face and enjoy chatting with you about the weather or food prices. You aren’t a stranger, but that is about as far as it goes. They don’t know your name or anything else about you, so it is hardly plausible to imagine that they might some day bring you a lucky break of any consequence. For purposes of our studies of luck, we won’t include those very flimsy contacts in our definition of “weak links.”
A better definition was developed once by a Harvard-funded psychologist, Dr. Stanley Milgram. He was interested in what psychologists call the “small-world phenomenon” – the often astonishing way in which people’s networks of weak links overlap. You meet a total stranger on an airplane, strike up a conversation, and discover, to your amazement, that you both know the same person. “Yes, it’s a small world!” you agree.
It certainly is, and Dr Milgram determined to find out just how small. His studies are directly relevant to our studies of luck. When you have a clear appreciation of how very small this “small world” of ours really is, you will be in a better position to understand why getting into the fast flow can bring a startling improvement in luck.
In considering networks of person-to-person contacts, Dr Milgram included both strong and weak links. But he excluded the very tenuous contacts such as a nodding acquaintanceship with a supermarket cashier. He was interested only in contacts in which there were “some meaningful, personal interaction”; and he defined those as contacts with people you know on a first-name basis. That is as good and quick a definition as any. Those are the “weak links” we are talking about: people you know on a first-name basis but would not classify as close friends or family.
Dr Milgram picked a “target person” at random: a woman who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was married to a divinity student. Then he picked a small group of “starting persons” in Wichita, Kansas. Wichita was chosen at random, and so were the so called starting persons. Each starting person got a letter from Dr Milgram. It said, in effect:
This is a study of the “small-world phenomenon.” Enclosed is a document addressed to a lady living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you know this lady on a first-name basis, please see that it gets to her. If you don’t know know her, please pass it along to somebody whom you know on a first-name basis and who, in your judgment, might know her.
The object of this odd exercise was, of course, to see how long a chain of weak links would be needed to get back to the target person. Dr Milgram asked people to guess how long the shortest chain would be. Most thought it would be one hundred links or more.
To Dr Milgram’s own astonishment, one chain completed itself in three links. A farmer to Wichita – one of the original “starting persons” – passed the document along to a minister friend. That man sent it to a minister he knew in Cambridge. That man sent it to a minister he knew in Cambridge. The Cambridge minister knew the target woman, and the chain was finished.
Of the chains that were completed, the longest had ten links, and the median number was five. A startling result. Yet it becomes less startling when you look at the mathematics of it. Let’s suppose you have first-name contacts – strong and weak links – with three hundred people. Let’s further suppose that each of them has an average of three hundred links. This means that your secondary links-friend-of-a-friend-would total some ninety thousand people. And your tertiary links-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-would total twenty-million.
With numbers like that, it is not surprising that the median chain in Dr Milgram’s experiment had only five links. By getting to know only three hundred people, you become a member of an enormous network of acquaintanceship.
But is it really that enormous? Are you really linked in a meaningful way with those twenty-seven million tertiary contacts?
Yes, indeed you are. Luck follows along linked chains of people until it hits targets, just as Dr Milgram’s document did. The flow very often begins with a friend-0f-a-friend.
Let’s suppose you are bored, lonesome, stagnating and in need of a life-changing love affair to get your engine tuned up again. You have a weak link with a man named A, a fellow member of a local political action group. One night A’s friend B, whom you don’t know gives you a party. A, discovering that you are at loose ends that night, asks B if it’s all right to bring you along. B says sure, as long as you contribute a bottle. Another guest is B’s friend ‘C’, known to neither you nor A. This C, a tertiary link in your network, is the life-changing person you have been waiting for.
That is how luck happens.
As your great love affair with C grows and blossoms, some of your friends may be jealous. “What luck!” They will complain. “Why doesn’t anything like that ever happen to me?” Perhaps because they are not in the fast flow. Your luck came to you because you knew A, along with 299 other people.
We noted before that a mere nodding acquaintanceship – “Hi, how are you? Some weather, huh?” – is too weak a link to be thought of as a potential conduit for the flow of luck. It will be useful, to ask in what way it is too weak. Principally, in one way: the other person doesn’t know enough about you.
The kinds of luck that this Second Technique is concerned with the breaks that flow to a target person along linked chains of people – cannot easily reach a target who is only a face seen in a supermarket. To be singled out as a lucky target, you must make something of yourself known to those who are your primary links in the network. These can still be what we’ve called “weak” links, but they must be at least strong enough so that people know who you are, what work you do, what your interests are, what kinds of rewards you look for in life.
It is necessary for them to know what you would consider a lucky break.
An appealing fact about our sometimes unappealing species is that, with exceptions, we enjoy bringing each other lucky breaks. We like to be the bearers of good tidings. In the words of Eric Wachtel, the consultant recruiter: “It really is very pleasant to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey Charlie, there’s a job opening that sounds as if it might be your kind of thing.'” But before people can target you for that kind of benign treatments, the must know what it would take to make you happy.
As Wachtel puts it, “If I am trying to fill a certain job, naturally I’ll go to people I know about or people I can find out about. There may be a lot of other good candidates around, but if they keep themselves hidden, obviously, their phones are never going to ring.” Your phone starts to ring when you feed the basic facts about yourself into the network.
It doesn’t happen only in the world of jobs and careers. Donna Metzger, an Atlanta woman, tells a story of what she calls “amazing” luck in selling a pair of Colonial-era dolls. When you examine the story, it becomes less amazing. The luck flowed to Donna Metzger because she found the fast flow and made her wants known to people.
The two dolls in question had been in her family for many generations, handed down through a long progression of grandmothers and grand-daughters. By the time Donna received them, they were badly in need of repair and cleaning. She did not want to undertake that work herself, having no interest in doll collecting. On the other hand she did not want to throw the dolls away, for she recognized that they might have a good deal of value for a collector. They were genuine handmade antiques.
She wanted to give them away, or sell them. The trouble was that she knew no doll collectors. The hobby is not a popular one like collecting coins or stamps. What could she do?
She wondered about placing ads in newspapers but postponed that decision. Meanwhile, she talked about her dilemma with people she knew. She knew many, being fast-flow oriented.
She had a weak link with a woman at a local tennis club. That woman talked frequently by phone with her brother – a strong link. During one phone conversation, the subject of antiques or collectors came up, and the woman mentioned the dolls that were perplexing her tennis-playing acquaintance, Donna Metzger. The brother said it was funny she should mention that, for he knew a woman who was an avid collector of antique dolls. The woman was a neighbor in the Philadelphia suburb where he lived. And so the chain was completed.
The doll-collecting woman, who thus acquired two rare items for a low price, undoubtedly felt she had been luck-blessed just as Donna Metzger did. Both women must have gone around telling the story in tones of awe: “I had the most amazing stroke of luck!” But was it really amazing? The two women were tertiary links in each other’s networks of acquaintanceship. Both made the completion of the chain possible by making themselves and their wants known to a lot of people.
A very similar story is told by a Connecticut woman. In her case, however, the result of luck’s flow was not merely to bring together a buyer and seller of a hobbyist’s item. It was to bring together a father and daughter.
Her mother had died in childbirth. Her father, unable to take care of her, had given her up for adoption. She knew this much and a few other details of her parents’ lives and her infancy. Since her teens she had been obsessed with the wish to be reunited with the father she had never known. Now she was in her forties and just about given up hope of finding him. She was involved in a lot of activities, knew a lot of people, and talked often of her long hunt for her father.
The chain began to form in exactly the same way as with Donna Metzger’s Colonial dolls. Somebody talked to somebody else and got the “funny you should mention that” reaction. As it turned out, there was a man living in California who often talked about a daughter he had last seen as a baby. The man’s age and some other clues made a pattern that seemed to hang together. The chain was complete.
“What astounding luck!” everybody said. But was it?
Go where events flow fastest. Specifically what does that mean? It means, simply, make contact with people. Get involved. Don’t be a sideline, watching events flow past. Plunge into the events yourself.
At work, counsels Eric Wachtel, go out of your way to make yourself known in your own company and outside it. Go to meetings, even boring ones. Join employee after-hour groups. Seek work assignments that will force you out beyond the little knot of people you usually associate with-your “home clump,” as Wachtel calls it. And all the time, make your career goals known to those you meet.
In off-the-job life, be just as much of a meeter and joiner. As Wachtel says, it isn’t necessary to try to be the local popularity king or queen. You can’t fake vivacity. The tinny quality is quickly detected; the effort is tiring; and in any case, it isn’t called for. If you’re a quiet person, then be quiet. All that is necessary is that you meet a lot of people and let them know just who you are.
Group activities are ideal: glee clubs, political advocacy groups, whatever your interests may be. If you wedded to a solitary pursuit such as stamp collecting, at least try to get involved in clubs and conventions devoted to that hobby. Also, go to parties. Give parties. Attend rallies. March in marches. If you exercise for fitness, don’t exercise alone; join the Y.
Consistently lucky people are nearly always to be found in the fast flow. I never met one who was a recluse or even reclusive.