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?
You answered your own question towards the end of your story —> “…didn’t come through hard work” and “…without ever working very hard.”
It’s not about working “hard;” it’s about working “smart.” All that you did was about making smart decisions. What you refer to as your “destiny to show up at the right time with the right skill set,” an old quote (paraphrased) states that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
It’s almost always about making good personal choices. You’ve prepared well, made good decisions, and defined your own destiny.
Thanks Brian, I was self aware enough to realize there wasn’t any academic field that was likely to challenge my abilities, I knew I had a faster computer in my head than normal. And I had researched the income potential of chemical engineering and had chosen it as early as in junior high school. So there was that. And I did pick a company that badly needed some new talent. But it’s hard to feel like I earned the results when I had great parents and a natural talent for tech.I don’t feel guilty, just blessed.
Excellent. Much of that is what makes the person. Parental influence is critical – again, not luck; but, them making good decisions for your benefit. (That’s what parents are supposed to do.)
Each of us are similarly influenced. My parents were a primary influence in my middle-class upbringing; and yet, after serving four years in the military, I was able to screw things up enough that 40 years ago, at the age of 25, I was living in poverty, in Section 8 housing in Dayton (Ohio). But then back to those root principles – make good, smart, personal decisions; follow the “success sequence;” Things will more than likely turn out well.
So, I researched what jobs fit my aptitude, were in-demand, marketable, paid well, and forecast to be needed well into the future. I chose computer science (in the aerospace field), earned my bachelors degree (and years later a masters degree), and haven’t looked back since.
No doubt parental upbringing and natural talent played a major role in that outcome. But, it could just as well have gone very, very badly had I not made the personal decision to turn my life around.
And as I approached retirement, I found that I could apply those same principles in a number of ways, including running for public office: (https://webapp2.wright.edu/web1/newsroom/2015/08/28/following-his-heart/)
For each of us, it’s almost always about making good decisions.
> 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.
That’s it right there to me. There are people who work hard and those who don’t. People who get opportunities and those who don’t. The richest people are those who are in that upper-right quadrant where both are true. Add on to that the work of relationships, work of finding hobbies that keep you fit and challenge your mind and it increases the odds of success.
Thanks Adam, I guess it is about taking your own gifts and finding an enjoyable way to monetize them. Lots of people would have hated my job probably, but it was perfect for me.I agree fitness is important, I am convinced it not only improves your body but also your mind.
Depends on how you judge success. This is certainly a Westernized view of it. Certainly you have won the financial and the martial, good for you. But then, you were born into the richest country on earth at the richest time of its history and ridden that wave. As I have. Our children will not be so lucky, based on the current National Debt of which we are all benefactors right now (corporations bouyed up and bailed out). There are other definitions of success. And it does sound like you are judging for 4 paragraphs out of 5. Remember that many have sacrificed based on a spouse who has cancer and needs caregiving, or a parent who needed caregiving and the corporation wasn’t real keen on that. I don’t want to take away from the hard work and what you have accomplished. But do you really think a black engineer would have had the same head nod from upper management? Or a woman? Maybe now, yes, but not 20 years ago. It just would have taken a lot more to “fit in” and you know that is important in corporate world. PS – thank you for being a charitable giver, I noticed that in your other posts, and please know that I think as highly of you because of than how high you climbed up a rickety corporate ladder.
I do admit that virtually all of the material success I’ve had was a result of circumstance and being dropped into a spot on this planet where failure would have been nearly impossible. Impossible for a white guy with a high IQ and great teaching parents who instilled a love for others in me. But I was also describing a controlled experiment where three nearly identical people with nearly identical privilege had different outcomes. And I’m blogging in a part of the webiverse that is focused on financial success though I agree it’s not the same as real success. Real success to me is relationships and the people you get to help. I try to give career tips because most people are going to have to work and because work is more fun if you get promoted and get paid more and get to mentor others. But if work was all I had, I’d be the saddest of people. Thanks for commenting Lisa, I usually only see things from my limited perspective and it helps to see things from another set of eyes.
I like how you did this, as it seems to be comparing apples to apples (at least as much as is possible). I see the same parallels with my friends and my husband’s friends. There was some room for error through the better part of our 20’s, and plenty of us royally screwed things up with some bad decisions but were able to get back on track. I don’t know if I know anybody who figured things out much past 30; the good or bad decisions compound quite a bit by that point.
Of course, a lot of credit goes to having good parents, being in a country with amazing opportunities, and having a good education. But plenty of people have all of those things and throw it all away. You chose to seize those opportunities and make the most of them. It sounds like you also chose to stay the course rather than always chase the newest, shiniest thing (much like in the tortoise and the hare). You can absolutely claim credit for that! While, of course, being grateful that some horrible tragedy didn’t knock you off your game.
Thanks Mrs. FCB, tortoise is appropo in my case. I ran 15 marathons and I was always sloooow even though I really gave it all I had. One thing I liked about the comparisons is I was the only guy extremely devoted to my job. Miles was not a “company guy”, work was just a job to him. But our outcomes are similar. I never felt like I sold my soul to work, but in a way, compared to him, maybe I did. It’s nice he could do it his way and still achieve great results.
I always look forward to your new articles because it always gives me food for thought. I have a best friend (same age and demographics) who I have know from my hometown since we were teenagers. She couldn’t believe how I can retire next year at 50. As I reflected back on our paths, there’s minor life choices along the way that collectively made a huge decision vs fate. The choice of going to a community college vs 4 year accredited university, the choice of declaring major immediately, the choice & ROI of graduate studies, the HCOL area, the career choice, friends/SO choice, hobbies/interests choice, and the list goes on. A flowchart of life’s choices and its impact may be an interesting read next, right?
It would D.O.G.! You’ve obviously made a lot of wise choices. I also wonder if life swings on those pivotal moments in our past or if we had chosen differently if we would have reverted to our mean, recovered, and still ended up at the same place? It makes life such a mystery because you only get one shot at every decision you make, you can’t go back and try it the other way. It’s dicey writing about this topic, almost anything you say is impacted by privilege, sounds like a humble brag and can be very offensive to the many who also made good choices but didn’t get similar results, through no fault of their own. Life is in no way fair.
This was a good post. It is amazing how good life choices compound growth. Contrary, bad decisions can pull others down.
I appreciate how you made comparisons of individuals of similar backgrounds and education. Although I’m younger, I have witnessed this with old high school buddies.
Lift is all about choices. As my parents always said, “make good choices.”
They do matter, the reason some people make better choices, that’s harder to figure out. That’s where parents, early life lessons, your ingrained personality type, the values you’ve inherited or chosen all play key roles. Thanks for commenting!