What is the secret to achieving financial success? Is it luck, or is there something more?
We all know that building wealth takes hard work and determination. However, millions of Americans work hard every day but never seem to reach their financial goals.
What sets highly successful people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mary Barra apart from the rest of us? Is it all down to luck, or is there some secret formula they use to skew the odds in their favor?
In this blog, we will explore the five things highly successful people do to create their own luck to achieve financial success. We will also share easy-to-implement tips to help you create your own luck as you strive to achieve your financial goals.
Meet The Luckiest Investor on Wall Street
Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of ARK Investment Management LLC, is one of the most successful self-made women on Wall Street. At the time of writing, her investment firm, ARK Invest, is valued at over $60 billion dollars. Cathie boasting an estimated personal net worth of $300 million.
Many consider her investment strategies controversial. Fluctuations in ARK Invest’s profits and losses have raised concerns about the asset management company’s risk profile over the years. Despite this, Cathie Wood is hard to ignore as the world’s most prominent and scrutinized investor.
Money Mindset: Create Your Own Positive Reality
Despite her reputation as a tech-driven disruptor of the asset management industry, Cathie is not the stereotypical hotshot young innovator we often associate with Unicorn startups. In fact, she was 57 years old when she started ARK Investment Management in 2014. The mother of three was serving as a chief investment officer for mutual fund and investment firm AllianceBernstein when she decided to strike it out on her own to establish ARK Invest.
In an interview with Forbes, Cathie explains that many of her closest friends and colleagues thought she was crazy to risk her retirement on a start-up at her age. Not only did she walk away from a highly sought-after position at a well-established company, but she did so to pursue investment strategies that AllianceBernstein had rejected as too risky.
Cathie’s idea to start ARK Invest began with a year of deep spiritual contemplation. This inspired her to call the company ARK, in recognition of the Biblical Ark of The Covenant. Despite her successes as a professional analyst, she had a deep desire to do something to bring about a positive change in the world. Her lifelong belief that innovative technologies could improve the world inspired her to build an investment vehicle that would enable innovators to drive positive change. Cathie decided to achieve this goal through actively managed funds targeting high-growth sectors like genomics, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
“Most people thought I was nuts because active management was dead. A close friend of mine called it a vanity project.… That threw me, but it also made me even more determined to prove him wrong.”
– Cathie Wood.
When making this courageous decision, Cathie demonstrated one of the five key ingredients highly successful people use to make their own luck: a money mindset rooted in abundance.
Step 1: Adopt an Abundant Money Mindset
The first step in creating your own luck as you build your wealth is shifting your money mindset.
- Your thoughts and beliefs about money have a profound effect on your ability to achieve financial success.
- Let go of limiting money belief.
- Believe in your ability to take an active role in your finances to become the master of your own destiny.
- Focus on opportunities rather than limitations and open yourself to abundant success.
Learning for Life: The Key to Financial Success
Born in Los Angeles in 1955, Cathie was the eldest child of Irish immigrants Gerald and Mary Duddy. Her father, Gerald, worked as a radar systems engineer for the military, leading the family to frequently relocate following his deployments. Cathie says that moving around as a child instilled a passion for new ideas and developed her readiness to recognize and embrace opportunities.
Cathie graduated from high school in 1974 and went on to college with the dream of becoming a scientist. While studying aeronautical science, she attended an economics class and quickly realized she had discovered her life’s calling. Cathie graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Southern California in 1981 and later obtained an MBA in Finance from the same institution.
Her education paved the way for a successful career in investment management, but her insatiable curiosity and drive for continuous learning are what truly set her apart in the field.
Step 2: Embrace Lifelong Learning
The second step in creating luck is embracing lifelong learning to achieve your financial goals.
- Be adaptable to change – it’s critical to success.
- Stay curious and open to new ways of thinking.
- By learning and growing, you’ll improve your understanding of the financial system, allowing you to make better decisions about your money in an ever-changing world.
Lifelong learning gives you the tools to make more informed decisions to grow your wealth faster, with less risk and greater certainty.
Financial Success: Luck or by Design?
Successful people often say: “I was at the right place at the right time” when reflecting on pivotal moments in their careers. Is this a question of chance or the result of careful planning and preparation?
Cathie’s knack for being at the right place at the right time when identifying opportunities others fail to see has little to do with luck.
Unlike most asset managers, she does not wait for opportunities to present themselves. She does the research, follows the data, and develops plans to capitalize on opportunities before they even materialize.
Early in her career, Cathie worked as an analyst at Jennison Associates. It was the 1980s, and the internet was in its infancy. While all the other analysts ignored stocks like Reuters, then a simple database publishing company, Cathie made sure to invest. In 2016, she famously bought stock in a little-known tech start-up at a mere $15 per share. By November 2021, that little-known company, the now famous Tesla, reached an all-time high of $409, representing an astronomical 2627% return on investment.
Many dismissed her early successes as “lucky guesswork.” However, Cathie’s “lucky guesses” continued to pay off, making her one of the most successful traders in innovative technology in the post-internet era.
Cathie’s success is not a question of luck. It’s the result of her ability to turn her knowledge and vision into implementable plans and follow through on them regardless of changing conditions. She is a master of the third ingredient highly successful people use to create their own luck: strategic planning.
Step 3: Start Planning Strategically
The third step in creating your own luck as an investor is to break free from the cycle of reaction and embrace proactive planning.
- Take control of your financial destiny by crafting a strategic investment plan.
- Don’t allow emotion or external events to dictate your financial decisions.
- Adopt a proven strategy based on universal wealth principles and use it as the foundation of all your decisions.
By mapping out clear goals, assessing risks, and keeping your end goal in sight, you position yourself to embrace opportunity and create your own luck as an investor.
Standing Firm: Success Through Adversity
Cathie’s rise to prominence in the investing world has not been a journey of unbridled success.
In 2020, ARK Invest made international headlines after posting gains of 152%, attracting nearly $20 billion in assets by 2021. However, the company’s flagship fund plunged 66% in 2022, resulting in massive losses for the company and its investors.
ARK Invest’s volatile performance over the years has resulted in massive criticism of Cathie’s investing strategies, which focus on buying small businesses with disruptive innovations that could revolutionize how people live and work. Despite her failures, Cathie remains steadfast in her approach.
“You gotta roll with the punches. I just haven’t felt very many punches, or I don’t choose to remember them because I am very focused on the future and getting where I want.”
Cathie Wood
Cathie’s relentless pursuit of high-risk stock in innovative technologies means she constantly balances the promise of enormous gains against the risk of losing it all. However, she insists that she is playing a “long-game,” informed by data and guided by strategies she has honed over her more than 50 years as an analyst.
Taking on the high level of risk Cathie embraces is not the safest strategy for middle-to-high-income earners trying to build personal wealth. However, Cathie’s willingness to learn from her mistakes while remaining steadfast in the face of adversity demonstrates the fourth ingredient that highly successful people use to create their own luck: resilience and persistence.
Step 4: Develop Your Resilience and Be Persistent
Your financial journey is likely to be filled with challenges, setbacks, and unexpected hurdles. Without resilience and persistence, setbacks may seem insurmountable, leading to disillusionment or giving up prematurely.
- Build your resilience so you can bounce back from setbacks with renewed determination.
- Adapt to changing circumstances.
- Learn from your mistakes
- Keep putting in the time and effort needed to achieve your financial milestones, especially when you are discouraged.
Cultivate these qualities so you are equipped to navigate the complexities of the financial landscape and ultimately achieve financial success.
Achieving Financial Success: Action over Reaction
Whether you support Cathie Wood or have reservations about her, one undeniable fact remains: She has forever transformed the traditional field of finance.
Cathie’s humble upbringing and subsequent rise to financial success defy the traditional thinking that to become super-wealthy, you must be born into money. She stepped into a leadership role in the male-dominated world of asset management at a time when women were seldom taken seriously on Wall Street.
As the founder and CEO of ARK Invest, Cathie continues to challenge the status quo with her bold and forward-thinking approach to investing. She is a front-runner in championing diversity and innovation in the financial world. Cathie has redefined the notion of disruption by injecting experience and maturity into the youth-driven Unicorn startup trend.
Cathie Wood has achieved much in her life by having the courage to ACT while others wait to REACT. This is the fifth and final ingredient that highly successful people use to create their own luck to achieve financial success.
Step 5: Take Action
Your life’s purpose informs your intentions. Your actions transform your intention into reality.
- Take time to reflect on why achieving financial success is important to you.
- Build a structured and strategic financial plan to achieve your goals.
- Take action every day to move closer to your goals.
- Be courageous in your actions.
Many people resist taking action in their financial lives because they fear failure. Remember, the only way to guarantee failure is to not get started in the first place.
Creating Your Own Financial Luck
Do you need luck to achieve financial success?
The answer is YES!
However, the luck you need is not up to chance.
With the right mindset, knowledge, skills, and support, you can become the luckiest person you know when it comes to achieving financial success.
Are you ready to take action to achieve your financial goals?
Make sure to book your spot for our upcoming Income Amplifier Workshop.
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