Better to Be Lucky?

 

Chance favors the prepared mind.

--Louis Pasteur

"Better to be lucky than smart," a man who had bought a track of land near the Amtrack rail yards  in Southeast Washington, D.C. told me. Nobody thought that land was worth much, given its proximity to noisy locomotives, but the price was low and he had some cash, and he bought it and it made him a millionaire.

I, on the other hand, have had a slew of lucky opportunities thrown in my path over the years and simply failed to act on them.

It's a little like that famous story about the man who looks to Heaven and cries out to God, "I've been faithful to  you and done good works all my life: Why have you never allowed me to win the Lottery?" And the clouds part and God's voice thunders out,  "Moishe, meet me halfway...Buy a ticket!"

Around 1992, when my younger son was about 7, he crashed into my room, and I was busy at my desk, but he was hopping from one foot to the other in one of his agitated states which had earned him the sobriquet, "Toad" after Toad of Toad Hall, who was forever jumping from one spasm of enthusiasm to another. 

We had been early adaptors of computer technology in our house. I bought a TRASH 80--the radio shack computer which allowed for word processing and despite being strapped for cash, I had purchased early computers as soon as a new advance was made, and Toad had inherited one, which he exploited in the basement and he explored the internet daily. 

Now he was highly agitated, demanding, "I need your credit card! NOW!"

"What for?"

"I need to buy a domain name!"

"And what is a domain name?"

"Uggggh. It's what you call your website. It's how people find you on the web!"

"And do you have a website?"

"No, but I need this domain name. Two actually."

"And what would you do with it?"

"Hold it and sell it!"

"How much?"
"Thirty five dollars...each."

"That's a lot of money."

"It'll be worth it!"

He dragged me down to the basement and I watched him plink in the information to whatever site he had found, and when the moment came, I allowed him to enter in my credit card numbers, sure that somehow I would be sucked into some con scheme to owe $10,000 to some Nigerian prince. 

He bought two domain names: "Business.com" and "Business Help.com."

Now, did I  consult any lawyer to find out what this latest gambit of my son might mean? No. And I knew plenty of lawyers--we lived in the Washington, DC suburbs. In fact, a friend was an SEC lawyer. I knew FEC lawyers. I knew people who wrote for the Wall Street Journal. But, no, I went back upstairs to whatever it was I was working on...some novel no doubt, and forgot all about it.

Until, a few weeks later, this son announced, triumphantly, someone had offered him $1,000 for the domain name, "Business.com"  

"Wow," I said. "That's quite a return on investment!" He agreed to sell for that but a little later, I told him, why not ask for $2,000 and then you could buy a really good computer. So he did, and they quickly agreed. Some in my family thought that reneging on the original price was unethical--after all, a deal is a deal, but I said this is the computer age, after all, there was not even a paper to sign your name on. And if they were willing to pay $2,000, then that's what the name must be worth.

In 1999, the domain name sold for $7.5 million and in 2007 it resold for $350 million.

So, chance fell upon two unprepared minds, in the case of my son and me.

Knowing next to nothing about business and Wall Street, I had for decades told everyone I knew, "If you ever hear about a company which comes up with a drug which really works for obesity, for weight loss, buy it. It'll be the only drug which 50% of Americans will buy, and they'll need it for the rest of their lives."

My neighbor, across the street, works for Lilly and she told me about a drug, Trulicity, which helped in diabetes but also caused weight loss. I was familiar with the class, the GLP1 agonists, which had been around since the late 1990's as Byetta, a protein isolated from the saliva of Gila monsters. It was the progenitor of the class and it worked reasonably well, but it was a twice a day injection and it could improve blood sugars, overall, as measured by a test called hemoglobin A1c by a point, which amounted to a 10-15% improvement in blood sugars. There was some minimal weight loss. Then came,  Trulicity, which was once a week, which was better, and it maybe lowered the glucoses a little better, but it was no significant advance.  I had patients on it, but I never pushed the dose as vigorously as my colleagues. Then the next generation came out: Mounjaro. This one was lowering the A1c by two, sometimes three points, and the weight loss was impressive, at least in some patients--80 pounds in nine months. 

But did I rush out and buy Lilly stock? 

Of course not. My mind was not prepared. 

I had a friend, Michael, who sunk $90,000 into Amgen when he heard they had come out with a drug called granulocyte stimulating factor, which prevented the wipe out of white blood cells in patients being treated with leukemia. But leukemia is actually a rare disease, and the patients would only need to be on it for a few months, so how much sense did that make? Never mind, Michael said and he invested and he made $1 million over a year on that gamble. Later, a lawyer I knew told me about a patent infringement case he had worked on brought by a Japanese drug company against Amgen which could have sunk Amgen beneath the waves in the midst of its dizzying rise, but fortunately for Amgen and for Michael, the case was resolved. Michael, of course, had no idea about that risk. He was lucky. And he was smart, as it turned out.

This time, I watched my neighbor, who had stock options in Lilly buy more at $131and she watched it  rise to $833. But did I buy a ticket?

Nope.

Truth be told, I seem to have enough money for now and what difference would becoming a millionaire make to me at my advanced age, when I am just hoping for a long slow, graceful slide into that end runway? The most important thing now is health, not money. And as the song goes: All your money can't another minute buy.

I would love to launch my favorite fantasy project, though. 

Visiting Florida, a few years ago, I noticed men on bicycles with tennis rackets slung over their backs headed to the club for their 5 PM martinis. And I thought: This is what they were looking forward to? This is retirement?

Michael, the guy who bet big and won big on Amgen, told me, when he was 27 that he wanted to retire at age 54 with enough money to do whatever he wanted. And I asked then, as we were both beginning our careers, why he would even think about retirement? What's the point? We should be imagining what our careers would be, what we would do, what we would accomplish. For him, it was business. How to earn enough money fast enough. His father had owned a grocery store. Now Michael had an MD degree and it was all about how to cash in and cash out.

Oddly enough, the big surprise was that for all our obsessions with our careers, it was something else which swooped in and provided the big reward in life: I had two kids. 

And they turned out to be the best thing ever to happen to me.

That was something my mind was totally unprepared for, but I was lucky, I guess.