Think of some lucky people you know, and then think of some you consider unlucky. Only highly visible difference is almost sure to stand out: The luckier are the busier.
Lucky people always seem to have many ventures going on at the same time. Even at the height of success in a major venture such as a career, the lucky man or woman will usually have secondary ventures going on or in preparation or under study – sometimes in bewildering variety. This affords protection in case the major venture runs into bad luck – which can happen unexpectedly at any time, as no lucky person ever forgets. If Venture A turns sour or simply turns stagnant and unexciting, maybe Venture B or C will burst in to flames in some unexpected way.
But if the lucky individual seems busy when things are going well, you will find him or her still busier in adversity. Yes, the lucky have their ups and downs like anybody else. The difference is that, with the lucky, down periods never last long and often end in surprising, unforeseen ways. Consider the delightful story of Charles Darrow.
Darrow’s story is one of the classic legends of luck. His brainchild is known throughout the world, but his own name is familiar only to a few. They talk of him fondly and reverently as the Man Who Passed “Go”.
Darrow was a 42-year-old heating engineer living in German-town, Pennsylvania, in 1933. He was basically a lucky man, but now he was involved in an episode of worldwide bad luck, the Great Depression. He had not had a steady job for three years.
As is typical of the lucky, however, he had a whole conglomeration of ventures going. He continued to seek work in his main profession as a heating engineer, but that didn’t keep him nearly busy enough. He established an appliance-repair business, which did fairly well, in a time when people couldn’t afford new appliances. He also set himself up as an expert in repairing cracked concrete walls and walks. This business, too, made sense in a cost-conscious time. Thinking his way along a completely different tract, Darrow also wondered about starting a low-cost boarding kennel and veterinary service. He began by visiting a local vet and arranging to work as a dog walker in exchange for instruction.
All this was a typically lucky reaction to adversity. The unlucky personality would seek just one way out of a hole – the obvious way: “I gotta find another job!” But Darrow’s reaction was more likely to bring success. His thinking went something like this: “It would be nice to find another job. I’ll try. But in case I don’t run into good luck along that route, I’d better look for luck in some other directions at he same time.”
The unlucky person knows exactly what form of luck he is seeking. If he does get lucky, the good luck will come in one shape only : a new job. Charles Darrow, by contrast, didn’t know just what he was hoping for. All he knew was that the more ventures he got himself into, the better were the odds that some kind of lucky break would come his way.
As it turned out, the big break that came crashing into his life, turning it upside down, was of a nature that startled even him.
Like millions of other middle-class Americans in the balmy 1920s, Darrow had been a small time plunger in the stock market. Now, in the bleak winter of 1933, he dreamed of how nice it would be to be rich. He reviewed his penny-ante Wall Street success and failures in his mind. What would have become of him if he had done this instead of that? Suppose he had sold his General Motors stock when it was trading above $1,000 a share instead of waiting till it crashed to $40? What would he do with that hypothetical money if he had it today? Put it into real estate, perhaps. People were making killings on land and buildings, even during the Depression. Darrow and his wife entertained themselves at meals by talking of ways in which they could become real estate tycoons.
It then occurred to Darrow that this kind of game might be absorbing to other people. Perhaps, he thought, Depression-weary people would find it fun to play a game in which they could imagine themselves playing with big money.
Darrow was handy with tools. Occasionally he had made jigsaw puzzles and other games for fun. Now, he found a large, round piece of oilcloth and sketched a schematic design of streets and housing plots on it. He gave the streets real names from Atlantic City, where he had enjoyed vacations in more prosperous times. Then, he colored the design with free paint samples from a local store. Next, he scrounged some free scraps of wooden molding from a lumberyard and he cut the scraps into small shapes resembling houses. He made title deeds from scraps of carboard.
At first, he had only a vague idea of the rules under which the game should be played, but his thoughts grew more distant as time went on. Using a pair of dice, some play money borrowed from a youngster, and colored buttons for tokens, Darrow and his wife and friends spent evenings and weekends playing the game. They refined it as they went along: added new rules, introduced new complications. As it finally evolved, the game had some kind of magic . People who were newly introduced to it would rapidly become fascinated and would want to go on playing all night.
Darrow called it Monopoly.
He saw it as a distinctly secondary venture in the beginning. Friends and neighbors asked him to make sets for them. He did, charging about a dollar a set. He was able to turn out tow handmade sets a day, which was roughly the level of demand. The game was advertised solely through acquaintanceship networks. Somebody would buy a set and invite friends to play, and the friends would then ask Darrow to make a set for them. He sold about 100 sets in this way. He was content with the slow trickle of orders .It never occurred to him that Monopoly might be anything more than a minor hometown industry. But then luck came blundering into the picture, with explosive results.
The first stroke of luck happened when Monopoly was introduced to a man who owned a small printing shop. It came about by sheer chance. The printer was visiting a friend. The friend had borrowed a Monopoly set for a game the previous night, and the set was still lying about on a table in the parlor. Because of that minor failure of housekeeping – the failure to pack away the set the night before – the history of Monopoly and the life of Charles Darrow were drastically altered. The printer looked at the game, was intrigued, and got himself invited back to play. After playing one game, he was hooked. A game so addictive, he thought, could be sold to a lot of people.
He approached Darrow and offered to print the Monopoly boards, fake money, and other paraphernalia. Darrow was delighted to be rid of the chore. The printer also launched a modest advertising and promotional campaign. He and Darrow upped production to six sets a day.
Then another stroke of luck added fuel to the developing fire. An official of a Philadelphia department store, motoring in the suburbs, developed engine trouble and pulled into a service station to get it fixed. While waiting, he strolled around the Mai Street district of the town in which he happened to find himself. In a drug or variety store, he saw some Monopoly sets, placed there on consignment by the printer-promoter. The Philadelphia man liked the look and idea of the game instantly. He bought a set and took it home with him.
A short time later, Darrow and the printer received an order for a wholesale lot of sets.
Monopoly was only a few months old, but Darrow suddenly found it growing beyond control. The Philadelphia store sold out its first shipment of sets and immediately ordered more. Word of hot new game spread to other Philadelphia stores, then to other cities. The stores began ordering in enormous quantities : 100 sets at a time, 200, 300. The stores couldn’t get them fast enough to satisfy the ever-growing demand. The printer couldn’t make them fast enough, and Darrow was drowning in paper from shipping, billing and purchasing side of the business. He and the printer had created a monster that threatened to eat them alive.
There was only one way out. Darrow went to see Parker Brothers.
Parker Brothers, established in 1883 in Salem, Massachusetts, was the nation’s biggest producer of table games. Darrow’s idea was to license Monopoly to this company on some kind of royalty basis.
Parker Brothers studied the game. The company had operated profitably for many years by sticking with some basic rules about what does and doesn’t make a good table game. One rule was that a game should be simple. Another was that it should not take more than 45 minutes to play out to a conclusion. Monopoly violated both these rules. It also violated others. All told, in Parker’s analysis, the new game contained 52 “fundamental errors.” The company turned Darrow down.
Back home in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, the Monopoly boom was still growing. Christmas, 1934, was approaching, and the stores were clamoring for more sets and still more. Darrow was exhausted and wanted to slow down, but the monster would not let him rest. He ordered a batch of 5,000 new sets to be manufactured. All were sold to stores before they came off the printer’s assembly line, while orders poured in for thousands more.
Word of all this frantic activity got back to Parker Brothers. “Suddenly”, a company report on the affair stats, “52 fundamental errors didn’t seem so bad.” Bravely admitting his mistake, Parker Brothers went back to Darrow, hat in hand, and offered him the royalty contract he had been seeking.
Darrow accepted, signed the contract and staggered off on vacation, so tired that it may have taken him a few days to realize how lucky he was. He was only in his early forties, but he would never need to work again for the rest of his life. A Year back, he had been an unemployment statistic; now, he was rich and fast getting richer. A once-minor venture had propelled him to instant success.
I once asked Parker Brothers’ president, Edward P. Parker, how much money Darrow earned all told from his fabulous venture; but Parker said that information was “of a confidential nature.” He did allow, however, that Monopoly was by all measures the most successful product the company ever put on the market. It is produced in 15 different languages. Some seventy-five million sets have been sold since Darrow signed that royalty contract. To supply all those sets with money, Parker Brothers had printed more than $1,000,000,000,000. That is a trillion dollars.
Lucky Charles Darrow was a millionaire many times over when he died in 1970, just short of his eightieth birthday. A lucky man indeed. But he was lucky because he put himself in position to be.
You never know what seemingly unpromising activity is going to be the one that catches fire for you. All you can know is that the more activities you have going on, the greater is the likelihood that something good will happen.
Charles Darrow certainly would not have guessed, back in 1933, that his big break would come from Monopoly. He might have thought some other venture looked more likely to succeed – the appliance-repair business, perhaps. But a table game? It didn’t seem to be anything more than a sideline venture – a way to pick up a little spending cash while having fun. Who would have thought that would be the big one?
But that is the way luck operates. By its very nature, it isn’t amenable to prediction. You cannot guess in advance what shape it will take or in what quarters it will strike. All you can do is what Darrow did: Cast out as many lines as possible to catch it.
Howard Hughes was a man who did that on a grander scale. It seems to have been a deliberate luck-changing effort on his part. He started out a nobody and ended as one of the richest people on earth, and he did it b juggling many ventures simultaneously.
In school, young Hughes’s class mates thought of him as a born loser. He was one of those silent, ghostly youngsters who drift about on the fringes of school child society. They come to school, they do their drab work, they go home. They leave no tracks. Years later, they vanish from memory. “No, I don’t remember him at all. Are you sure he was in our class?”
But some kind of fire was ignited in Howard Hughes very suddenly after he left high school. Dozens of biographers and reporters have tried to find the source of that fire, without success. Hughes himself never offered any enlightenment. Teachers and classmates were at a loss to explain the change in their resident loser. But the explanation may really be quite simple. Hughes may have decided he wanted a luckier life. He was fed up with being a loser and wanted a new start. It happens that way often. People change because they decide they want to. No special trigger or traumatic event has to happen.
It is a common misconception that Howard Hughes inherited enormous wealth from his father. Not so. The senior Hughes left an estate valued at about 600,000, which the 18-year-old Howard had to share with relatives. The main component of the estate was the Hughes Tool Company, maker of oil-field equipment. Three-quarters of the company’s stock went to young Howard Hughes.
At that point in his life, he was no different from hundreds of other Texas kids whose parents had made money on oil. Most of those kids went nowhere. Their names ring no bells today. But young Howard Hughes was about to improve his luck. He saw his father’s modest capital not as a cushion on which to sit and grow fat but as a bag of seeds that could be made to grow – provided somebody stood up, went out into the world, and sowed them.
The loser abruptly became a winner. Normally, when a minor inherits a controlling block of capital stock in a company, the stock is turned over to some kind of voting trust or other legal proxy until the youngster reaches 21 years of age. But young Hughes had suddenly become impatient to get going. To everybody’s surprise, he went to court and argued that he was competent to vote the shares himself. Under Texas law, a judge could grant that wish if the youngster made a good case. Hughes did.
The Hughes Tool Company at the time was a very small, modestly prosperous company with a promising but by no means guaranteed future. Like Charles Darrow, who refused to pin his hopes solely on the chance of finding a new engineering job, young Howard Hughes decided that he needed other ventures besides the Hughes Tool Company. He plunged into a bewildering variety of them: movies, aircraft manufacturing, electronics, hotels and casinos, real estate, an airline. Not all of these ventures succeeded. His aircraft company, for instance, was never able to produce a saleable military plane or an economically viable passenger carrier. But because he had other ventures going, good luck was likely to strike somewhere, and it did.
He made movies that are generally felt to be of mediocre artistic merit, but some f them, by luck, made a good deal of money. Quite by accident – by sheer, blind good luck – he made a stupendous amount of money on TWA stock. And so it went. His wealth when he died was estimated at more than a billion dollars.
What would have happened if, instead, he had pinned all his hopes on the Hughes Tool Company? There were times in its life when this company might have foundered but for infusions of money from other Hughes ventures. Without those other ventures, Howard Hughes could have died broke and unknown.
This Twelfth Technique is closely allied with the Second: Fast-flow orientation; and the Sixth: the zigzag path. Taken together, they can keep you busy. Busier than you think you want to be, perhaps.
The lucky life is indeed characterized by a degree of hustle and bustle that seems frantic at times especially to the chronically unlucky. As a candidate for good luck you will find yourself juggling many ventures that compete for your time and attention. Your life will be a whirl of people as you seek the fast flow. Instead of plodding toward a distant goal in a straight line, you will often be distracted by unexpected new opportunities that pop up to your left and right, and each one will require new decisions and more actions.
“She really is too busy,” Elizabeth Arden’s second husband said of her. “She makes me dizzy.” This man, a Russian expatriate named Prince Michael Evlanoff, seems to have led a generally luckless life until he married the cosmetic queen, but even that good luck did not last long. After two years, they could not stand each other and were divorced. Like many lucky people, Elizabeth Arden impressed some who knew her as being too busy for her own good – and she was certainly too busy to suit those who hoped to monopolize her time.
We’ve looked at her life in another context. It was the willingness to be busy that was the chief contributor to her lifelong good luck. After zigzagging through a number of possible careers, she started her first venture: a chain of beauty salons. But even that wasn’t enough to guarantee lasting luck. The salons started brightly but eventually turned into money losers. Elizabeth Arden was saved by the fact that she had many other ventures going by the time the salon business turned sour.
She herself does not seem to have been troubled by the demands of a busy life. This is typical of the lucky: “I think I must look more harried than I feel,” Senator Paula Hawkins of Florida said once to a group of reporters. Somebody had asked her if the typical Washington life of “rushing around,” didn’t take more out of her than it was worth. “I like ‘rushing around’, as you call it, “she said. “It isn’t a life that was forced on me, it’s a life I chose. I wouldn’t be happy with a slower pace.”
Senator Hawkins hit the nail on the head. The lucky life tends to look considerably more harried to others than it feels to the man or woman living it. Don’t shy away from it out of fear that it will give you ulcers and high blood pressure. “It’s a common item of pop psychology that being busy is bad for you,” says University of Chicago psychologist Dr. Gene Gendlin. “There’s no scientific basis for the belief. What counts is how you feel about being busy. If it feels good in the body, if it feels right, then for you it is right.”
Dr. Gendlin is the author of a widely acclaimed book entitled Focusing in which he explains his method of zeroing in on what he calls the “bodily felt sense” of a problem or cluster of problems. Many people, he says, have such a big and busy array of worries that the very variety of them makes it hard to concentrate on any one and get it solved. In many cases these are potentially lucky people who have temporarily let themselves be overwhelmed by a busy life.
Dr. Gendlin suggests a simple and remarkably effective way out of this pickle: Sit down quietly and make a list of what your major worries are. It can be done mentally or in writing, as you prefer. Make no attempt to solve the problems. Simply acknowledge that they are there and stack them up in a pile, as it were, “Yes, there’s that problem about my relationship with George, and there’s that old one about my career, and there’s the stock market making me nervous again.”
The effect is exactly like that of making a things-to-do list before going away on vacation. Everybody is familiar with the kind of panic that can arise before you leave. In the last few days, you find yourself running around in circles. Every time you take care of one last-minute detail, you think of two more that need your attention. You run faster and faster and get dizzier and dizzier.
In that state, you are likely to do the very thing you fear: forget something important. How can you calm yourself? By sitting down and making a list of what needs to be done.
The list by itself doesn’t get the jobs done, of course. What it does do is make you feel better. It gives you the sense of having gained control over a situation that was going haywire. In this more tranquil state, you can approach the indicated chores in a confident, orderly way.
Making a list of problems and worries produces the same state of calm, the feeling of control. Many people feel an actual, physical easing of tension in the body when they take this simple step. The easing is immediate and profound. Unlike a tranquilizing drug, this medicine can be taken as often as you wish.
Make a list of worries whenever your life seems to get too busy and you feel the beginnings of panic. In nearly all cases, you will find, the panic hasn’t arisen because you have taken on too much; it has arisen, rather, because you have allowed an array of worries to get disorderly and uncontrolled. Each seems twice as bad because you have a lot of others snapping at your heels simultaneously, and the total effect is a feeling of thrashing about amid mounting chaos. Making a list restores order.
The luckiest men and women always find some way of juggling many ventures and activities successfully. If you seek good luck, it is far better to be busy than not busy enough.