A Surprising Superpower of Ridiculously Rich People: The Ability to See What’s Right in Front of Their Faces

Lessons about wealth, courtesy of the Miss Hawaiian Tropic Bikini Competition

Picture yourself and a friend stranded on a desolate stretch of desert highway, on foot, in genuine need of rescue. A Hawaiian Tropic bus slows and stops beside you. The door opens, and multiple young, bikini-clad women lean out. One explains that they are traveling the country on a national bikini tour, but they are shorthanded. They need two “oil boys” to, in her words, “grease us up” before each competition.

Put yourself in the shoes of an unencumbered straight man for a second. Would you take the job without a moment’s hesitation?

Or…

Would you balk and say, “there’s a town about three miles that way. I'm sure you'll find a couple of guys there.”

If you came of age in the 1990s, this may sound suspiciously like a scene from Dumb and Dumber. It is. And you’re probably certain you’re smarter than Harry Dunne and Lloyd Christmas, the two nitwits who spent that cinematic masterpiece failing upward. You’d recognize the opportunity in front of you. You’d get on the bus.

Would you, though?

I ask because I was surprised to learn recently that there’s evidence that our propensity for waving the Hawaiian Tropic girls onto lucky oil boys in the next town over is higher than we might assume. And this can affect your wealth.

Indeed, recognizing the opportunity to get on the metaphorical Hawaiian Tropic bus might be a big part of what separates exceptionally successful people from everyone else.

I learned this from reading All the Money in the World, a book by veteran journalists Peter W. Bernstein and Annalyn Swan. It chronicles how members of the Forbes 400 have made and spent their fortunes. It’s a fascinating look at the myriad ways wealth can be acquired, donated, fought over, or frittered away. The careful rich have amassed empires spanning generations. The more spendthrift rich comically and cringe-worthily recall English soccer legend George Best’s memorable quote, “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”

But the frivolous rich, however amusing, and the careful rich are alike in one important way: luck generally played an essential role in their wealth-building phases. Surprisingly often, one lucky break was the critical fulcrum on which an entire fortune turned. And, as it happens, having a nose for lucky opportunities is a skill.

People’s thoughts and behaviors, according to Richard Wiseman, a noted psychologist, luck expert, and professor at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, contribute greatly to their experience of lucky circumstances. To a large extent, these thoughts and behaviors are controllable. “Lucky people,” he said in a 2003 article for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, “are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities. [They] make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophecies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.” Unlucky people, on the other hand, are tenser and more anxious, with anxiety disrupting their ability to notice the unexpected. As a result, they often blow incredible, life-changing lucky breaks staring them right in the face, “because they are too focused on looking for something else.”

That “something else” is often the byproduct of the person’s far too specific—or unrealistic—expectations, hopes, or dreams. For example, the unlucky attend parties, Wiseman contends, “intent on finding the perfect partner and miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.” It seems that the perfect, in their worlds, is very much the enemy of the good enough.

Wiseman cited a concentration experiment illustrating the negative aspects of overly anxious hyper-focus. In the study, people were asked to watch a moving red dot in the middle of a computer screen. While participants tried to focus on this dot, other larger dots would occasionally flash at the computer screen’s edges. At first, all participants noticed them. But when the scientists conducted this experiment again, this time with a large financial incentive for staying laser-focused on the center dot, participants became much tenser. Over a third of them did not notice the large dots when they appeared at the edges of the screen. “The harder they looked,” Wiseman lamented about their intense focus on the center of the screen, “the less they saw.”

On the other hand, rich people tend not to waste a lot of time and energy staring anxiously at the metaphorical red dot in the center. (Or, even if they do, they do so without losing the ability to see the bigger picture—the whole screen, as it were.) No one would accuse Warren Buffett of being unfocused in his investments, yet he’s relaxed enough about his process to formulate some of his best ideas in the bathtub. And then, when the critical piece of luck comes along, habitually lucky rich people often spot it and leverage it to an exceptional degree.

Both Wiseman and the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig, in his book Your Money & Your Brain, use the legend of Barnett Helzberg Jr. to illustrate this point.

Helzberg was a successful jeweler who, by 1994, had created an empire with annual revenues of nearly $300 million. On a spring morning in May of that year, he was visiting Manhattan. Walking near the Plaza Hotel, he heard a woman call out to Warren Buffett, who happened to be standing a few feet away. Helzberg, who owned Berkshire Hathaway shares, recognized the man and the moment.

Making his own luck, Helzberg stepped forward and introduced himself. “I’m Barnett Helzberg of Helzberg Diamonds in Kansas City, and I believe that my company matches your criteria for investment,” Helzberg recalled, as recounted in Zweig's Your Money & Your Brain. The whole exchange lasted less than a minute. Buffett asked him to send the details. A year later, Buffett bought Helzberg Diamonds. It’s been part of the Berkshire Hathaway family since 1995, but history may never have unfolded this way if Helzberg hadn’t leveraged the opportunity of a lifetime to the hilt once he spotted it.

As Helzberg’s story illustrates, increasing your luck seems a question of attitude. It turns on sharpening habits of mind that anyone can acquire. Again, these are: maximizing chance opportunities by, for example, making yourself more open to new experiences; listening to lucky hunches; expecting good fortune; and turning bad luck to good by looking on the bright side of situations that could’ve been much worse.

I hope you are as relieved and inspired as I am to learn that you don’t need luck to get luckier. Attaining luck is apparently simple: you train your mind to find it and court it methodically; one’s “luck deficit” seems eminently fixable. This is, of course, remarkable news for those of us who would like to be as lucky—in business and in other endeavors—as Harry and Lloyd should have been with the Hawaiian Tropic girls.