Robert Frank on “Success and Luck”
Published on May 13, 2016
Robert Frank , research scholar at NYU Stern and the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management at Cornell University, delivered the 2016 Ashok C. Sani Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence Lecture at NYU Stern on April 12, 2016. In this year’s talk, entitled “Success & Luck,” Professor Frank lays out for students how all career paths include random, unpredictable steps and advises them to become experts in their fields and be ready to take advantage of chance opportunities.
Also see a curated list of top hedge fund letters
Robert Frank
6:18today but let me just as a preface described to you maybe luckiest thing
6:24that ever happened to me I’m I’m going to say this is a big room full of people
6:29even in a room full of people this big I’m almost certainly the luckiest person
6:35in the room that it’s never certain that there could be someone who’s even more
6:40fortunate that I’ve been but I think it takes them a much bigger arena at the
6:46likelihood of that be more than 50% but you tell me afterwards come come round
6:52and if you think you’re lucky you don’t really know how lucky I’ve been just
6:55tell you a couple of things this is my long-time friend collaborator tennis
7:02partner time limits the psychologist at cornell he and I were playing tennis one
7:09called morning in November of 2007 later told me that early in the second centers
7:16we SAT during a changeover I complained of feeling nauseated and he said the
7:23next thing he knew I tumbled off the bench where we were sitting and was
7:27lying motionless on the side of the tennis court he knelt to investigate I
7:32wasn’t breathing and had no pulse yelled out for someone to call 911 and then
7:39thankfully he flipped me over onto my back and started pounding on my chest
7:45something we’ve all seen in movies but I’ve never been trained to do he hadn’t
7:50been either he he acted quickly he said that it took for ever but finally got a
7:58coffin of me but then as quickly as that happened I was wrong again no breath no
8:04pulse and
8:07he was about to give up hope when he said the doors to the facility burst
8:11open in in rushed an emergency medical team they cut my shirt off me they put
8:16the paddles on my chest they may shock me back into existence put me and took
8:23me to the local hospital where they flew me to a larger hospital in pennsylvania
8:27there they put me on ice overnight and three days later I began to have some
8:36idea of what was happening
