Introduction

Laying out and following a sure path to a successful life is simple, hard, and oh-so-well well worth it. Politicians and government are preaching, promising and rewarding the opposite. For their benefit, and to our detriment.

This deliberate and self-serving reversal of how things need to be is the subject of today’s 10-minute podcast.

Continuing

The rules for succeeding in life are simple. If you merely do the basics; finish high school, hold a full-time job and don’t have kids until you are married, you will escape poverty and be self-supporting. Add further education focused on a vocation, anything from welding to brain surgery, and greater success will be yours. Work hard over time, start early investing 10% of your earnings in your future and don’t finance anything that depreciates and it gets even better. The rules are indeed simple.

But these simple rules are hard to follow. Hard work by definition is hard. Investing rather than spending can also be challenging. Getting a real education, digging into your studies when others are larking around, can be difficult. Delaying gratification instead of buying things you want--really want--can be hard, very hard.

But doing all of it, pursuing all parts of a successful life, is more than well worth it.

However. However, politicians, government, gets all of it backwards. Government’s rules are highly complex, not simple. Their rules, 80K pages of tax law and the tens of thousands of overly complex rules and regulations that govern all of us, are just a part of the damaging complexity. And instead of hard, many politicians are trying to outdo each other in the effort to trade making life unhelpfully easy in exchange for votes. If they are as successful as they’d like to be, life will be less and less worth it because less and less of what we have will have been truly earned. And the joy, the deep satisfaction part of the reward for that which has been truly earned, will muted by the growing governmental oversight that comes with the unnecessary complexity. As well as the discouragement that would come from seeing more and more people being handed--partly with the money you earned--what you have worked for years to realize.

The rules for a successful life are clearly simple to understand. Luck does play a hand; my favorite definition of luck is, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." This quote, attributed to Roman philosopher Seneca, reminds us that we make our own luck. Thomas Edison put a simple to define, but hard, task in front of himself: invent the light bulb. He failed over a thousand times before he finally came up with an electric bulb that worked. Was he lucky that he finally found the right way to make one? Was he unlucky that it took a thousand attempt. Or does his amount of luck or lack thereof mean nothing because he was going to keep at it until he succeeded?

My favorite emerging singer in the late ‘50s was Harry Bellafonte. As a high school student, I was intrigued by the origins of American folk music, including English sea chanties, negro spirituals and prison songs, cowboy tunes, early American songs and folk music from other countries. Bellafonte’s clear, lilting voice, giving life to folk music from well south of our borders charmed and excited me. Only the most popular of his songs are around today, but my favorites, ones no longer being played, were more deeply rooted in the cultures he sang about. And far more soulful. By 1959 or so he was being identified as an “overnight sensation.” I thought that was a compliment--becoming so famous so fast. The lesson came when I heard him say, “It took me 20 years to become an overnight sensation.” The simple to define task of becoming a singer took 20 years of hard work. And then more work after his discovery. And that’s the way it needs to be.