This morning I’m reading about how AI scams are becoming more common online as AI technology becomes more widely available.
While it is true that they better AI technology gets, the more convincing scams will become, what breaks my heart is the victims that didn’t fall for the scams because they were greedy, but because they were desperate.
All Steve Beauchamp wanted was money for his family. And he thought Elon Musk could help.
Mr. Beauchamp, an 82-year-old retiree, saw a video late last year of Mr. Musk endorsing a radical investment opportunity that promised rapid returns. He contacted the company behind the pitch and opened an account for $248. Through a series of transactions over several weeks, Mr. Beauchamp drained his retirement account, ultimately investing more than $690,000.
Another theme that came up in this article is the layman’s belief that wealthy people are wealthy because they know some sort of secret that you don’t know. If only you knew the secret, you would be wealthy too.
“There’s definitely a group of people who believe that the secret to wealth is being hidden from them,” said Molly White, a researcher who has studied crypto communities. They think that “if they can find the secret to it, then that’s all they need.”
The truth of the matter is that there is no secret. Most wealthy people come from wealthy families (like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and so on). They were born into wealth, surrounded by wealthy friends and family members, sent to the best schools where they networked with other wealthy people, then went on to be the heads of wealthy companies.
What Buffett Calls the Ovarian Lottery
Warren Buffett has said that the luckiest thing that ever happened to him was being born in the United States in 1930. He calls it winning the ovarian lottery: you do not get to choose your parents, your country, or your era, and those three accidents of birth explain more of a person’s outcome than anything they do later.
Buffett’s point sharpens the post’s own argument. Even the genuine rags-to-riches stories are full of invisible luck: being born smart, being healthy, never needing to raid the savings account at the wrong moment. Hard work matters, but it operates inside a luck envelope it cannot escape.
Sure, there are true rags to riches stories, but even in those cases, luck plays an incredibly huge role. Unfortunately, lucky people tend to forget about their luck once they’re successful. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes about their hard work and grit.
You can be the hardest working person there is, but without luck, you can still go nowhere.
The Part You Can Control
Luck decides the cards. Your decisions decide how you play them. The luck-aware investor does three things: saves aggressively instead of assuming future income will bail out present spending, buys productive assets instead of lottery tickets, and avoids ruin above all else, because one wipeout ends the game no matter how good the prior cards were.
That is the honest version of the post’s advice. Play it safe, as the closing section says, not because caution makes you rich but because caution is the only way to stay in the game long enough for luck to find you.
Live in reality
The best you can do for yourself is live in reality. Were you born into a wealthy family? Are you as smarter than 96% of hedge fund managers (who are likely very smart)?
If you’re like me, then you’re neither of those things so the best thing we can do is try to not be too clever. We need to play it safe and not get distracted by possible shortcuts to wealth because those shortcuts are often times sending us in the wrong direction.
This article is part of the Winchell House Original Articles series.
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