Have you won the luckttery?

Did the fact that Abdul Lateef Jandali grew up in Mountain View (California) have anything to do with toddlers who try to zoom into pictures in analogue books just by using their fingers?

Yes, it does.

Abdul Lateef Jandali was born out of wedlock to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdul Fattah Jandali. Joanne decided to give the child up for adoption because her parents were opposed to this marriage. She chose a ‘Catholic, well-educated, and wealthy’ couple, but they backed out at the last minute. Her compromise choices were Paul and Clara - neither wealthy nor college-educated. She agreed to give the child to them only after they promised to save up for college.

This child became Steve Jobs.

Multiple what-ifs could have derailed Steve Jobs’ early years. What if Joanne had decided to raise him as a single mother? What if the earlier couple had not backed out? What if Joanne had not made his adoptive parents promise to send him to college? What if Paul and Clara had not lived in Mountain View, right next to Stanford’s engineering talent? What if Steve Wozniak had not been Steve Jobs’ neighbour?

Three things that are completely out of our control -

1. our gender

2. where we're born

3. and to whom

-also have an outsized influence on not only our early years but also our entire life's trajectory.

Today, we look at lucky beginnings - how the luckier we start, the luckier we get.

Privileges of good luck and misfortunes of bad luck compound over time

Well begun is half done.

Wealth attracts wealth.

The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

These are not just cliches but descriptors of The Matthew Effect.

The Matthew Effect (also called The Principle of Cumulative Advantage) says that the more financial and social capital we start with, the easier it becomes to accumulate even more and vice versa.

[The Matthew Effect is credited to Robert K. Merton, a sociologist at Columbia. He named this effect after a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: "For everyone who has, will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him."]

Here are two real-life proofs of The Matthew Effect.

1. The timing of starts can give higher earnings, regardless of skill and talent.

Timing of graduation determines earnings over our lifetime.

Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale followed graduates over 20 years and found that timing of graduation impacts earnings over a lifetime.

In her study, ‘unlucky grads’ (students graduating in a recessionary year) earned less than ‘lucky grads’ (who graduated during an economic boom). Not only that, ‘unlucky grads’ were never able to bridge the earning gap.

When you compare the unluckiest (the 1980 and 1981 grads) to the luckiest (1988 grads) the earnings gap, almost 20 years later, is 10%. -Lisa Kahn

2. The Matthew Effect is the opposite of meritocracy and is visible in the social media space too.

A study has found that e-commerce product reviews that are posted early get more ‘helpful’ votes just because there aren’t enough reviews for comparison. These ‘helpful’ votes then attract more readers and even more votes. Later reviews, even though they might be more helpful, get overlooked.

Early success becomes self-perpetuating for two reasons.

One, we want to back a winning horse to maximize our investment. That’s why our systems are rigged to favour the rich and famous. The wealthy find it easier to get loans, make friends, and get first right of refusal for opportunities.

Combine the good fortune of birth with hard work, and you will have career gold.

Forbes has declared Kylie Jenner the youngest 'self-made' billionaire. I do not doubt that she is very hard-working. She may also be talented and a savvy businesswoman, but she has had a lot of help from the privilege of being a Kardashian in building her cosmetic empire.

Two, we are sponges in our early years. If our upbringing offers the right environment, we are better able to absorb the right skills and get a head start in honing our talents.

One proven example is the importance of early reading habits. It has been found that students who start reading early and also enjoy it kickstart a virtuous cycle of learning.

Over time, the gap in learning compared to peers who are not inclined to read keeps widening.

This concept of early learning works across fields. Chess, for example.

The Polgár sisters prove that greatness can be engineered from the early years.

László and Klara Polgár, Hungarian educators and psychologists wanted to prove that geniuses can be made through thoughtful and early training. So they started training their three daughters -Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit in chess since they were toddlers.

Today, all three are amongst the top ten female players in the world. Judit became the youngest-ever grandmaster at 15 (after beating male players), while Zsuzsa became the Women's World Chess Champion.

Closer to home, the Phogat wrestler sisters share the same story of proving that luck can be deliberately engineered if we start early.

Having said this, life would not be so interesting were it not for exceptions.

So many times, we only know we got lucky in hindsight. Here's a crazy story of how poor judgement can throw away the good fortunes bestowed by the luckttery.

Two people had won the lottery; only one became a billionaire.

Gary Kildall could have been Bill Gates. Gary headed Digital Research Services and built a PC operating system first (CP/M-86). In 1980, IBM approached Bill Gates and asked him to build an operating system for their computers.

Bill Gates did not have an OS ready, so he sent them to meet Gary instead.

Gary did not think the deal was valuable and sent IBM away.

IBM went back to Bill Gates, who had bought CP/M-86 by then. Bill Gates tweaked it for IBM, named it PC-DOS, negotiated a licensing deal instead of an outright sale, and started shipping it.

Gary realized he had made a mistake, and this time, he approached IBM. IBM agreed to offer both operating systems alongside their PCs. But they priced PC-DOS at $40 and CP/M-86 at $240. Obviously, the cheaper one sold more and made Microsoft what it is today.

Gary Kildall and Bill Gates both had won the birth luckttery.

Gary was born in Seattle to second-generation immigrant parents who sent him to college and then for a PhD. The Navy posted him in Monterey (California), an hour from Silicon Valley. There he discovered computers and never looked back.

Bill Gates was also born in Seattle to an upper-middle-class American family with resources to send him to private school. His school happened to have a computer (very rare in the 1960s-70s), upon which he learnt programming.

Why was Gates able to ‘see’ the possibilities in the IBM deal and not Kildall? When asked how much of his success was due to luck, Bill Gates said,

“Our timing in setting up the first software company aimed at personal computers was essential to our success. The timing wasn’t entirely luck but without great luck it wouldn’t have happened”. - Bill Gates

Thanks for reading. Next week we will see how we can engineer luck and sometimes even use lousy luck to propel ourselves forward.

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