There were three of us in college, all engineering students and all avid outdoorsmen. We hunted, fished, hiked, skied and canoed our way through our four year degrees in chemical and mechanical engineering and got together at least annually for many years after that. I ended up in Arkansas, Miles ended up designing nuclear reactors in Silicon Valley and Cam ended up all over the place. We had virtually the same BS engineering degrees but our lives took different paths.
In my case I married my college girlfriend as soon as we both graduated and I went back to work where I had interned the summer before. Who knew I’d be there for the next 38 years and eventually would be running the company. Well, I sort of knew, or at least hoped to make it work out like that. But Miles and Cam moved around a little bit more. In Miles case after the nuclear industry dried up he went into automotive manufacturing back in Arkansas. Like me he then became a lifer at that company and like me he retired slightly early at the age of 60, financially independent.
I saved and invested more than enough for retirement and then inherited a tidy sum to top off the nest egg. I also kept earning six figures annually in retirement by doing some light niche consulting that paid extremely well. Miles had made a good living but had not hit upper management like I had so he had not accumulated as much in investments. However he had a keen eye when it came to finding rental property and accumulated nearly a dozen rent houses by the time he retired. He was generating a significant passive income as well as growing his net worth as the houses appreciated. His wife loved the people aspect of mentoring the young families renting from them. So me and Miles were living retirements we enjoyed with more money than we cared to spend.
Not so with Cam, he seemed to move from job to job pretty often. He also moved from one industrial sector to the next. He gained a wide skill set but also one that wasn’t as deep as mine or Miles’ And where I was the gifted fast mover in my company and Miles was the key technical guy at his, Cam was stuck in middle management and did not develop the reputation of technical or managerial excellence needed to protect him from office politics. He never had many good things to say about his bosses or coworkers. And apparently the feelings were mutual. Rather than trading his existing job for a better one when he changed employers he seemed to move into the same level job over and over. His current job had seemed to be one in which he had turned the corner. He had moved to a higher level of management with international responsibility over plants in several countries. It was nice seeing Cam win bigger than he had in the past, especially since he was now 66 years old and job hopping doesn’t work as well as it did when he was younger. But alas, Covid decimated his company’s prospects, as it has to so many, and the last I heard he was only working a part time schedule and was expecting to lose his job any day.
Are there great life lessons to be learned from the three of us? Maybe some small ones. The two of us who have been married for forty plus years to the same and only spouses have plenty of money and the one who is married to his third wife has much less. The two of us who have outdoor hobbies of hiking and running and golf and tennis and cycling are financially independent while the one whose hobby is gambling at casinos is not. The two of us with mostly older used cars and who live frugally were able to retire early and the one with two Mercedes and a brand new $50,000 pickup truck is still working at 66.
We are all still friends and still try to get together, though with aging parents in the picture it is hard for both of them to get away. And I try not to judge, I’ve been extremely lucky and privileged in life. Most, maybe all of my good fortune didn’t come through hard work. It was pretty much my destiny to show up at the right time with the right skill set to make millions without ever working very hard. I think that was true for Miles as well and though he made less, he still made well over average wages. Our wives were also a huge part of our success in business, but we had dated others that might not have been great partners in life. That’s luck too, finding a soul mate. Cam didn’t, at least not the first two times and that cost him his savings, and his relationships with his kids. Its hard to know how much a career suffers when there is chaos at home, but I’m sure it is a significant factor working against success. Just as having a warm and loving home and a strong relationship with your kids gives you super powers in the office.
So I count my blessings and am glad Miles shares the same peace and security. And for Cam I hope things get much much better.
What about your friends, do you see a stark contrast in the outcomes they face?
How much of your own success do you think is a result of your choices versus where fate dropped you on this planet?