Everybody is trying to be the winner. There are thousands, often tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of contestants in these winner tank all contest.

There are natural limits on how hard you can work and how smart you can be. So there are lots and lots of people bumping up against those natural limits.

Let's find the contestant out of the many thousands of them who is the smartest, hardest working in the whole set.

How lucky will he be? Well, since we've chosen him without regard to luck only because he was the hardest working most talented, his luck will be neither good nor bad. It'll be average on the luck scale.

Today we're talking with Robert H. Frank, he's a professor at Cornell and the author of Success and Luck, Good Fortune and the Myth of Maritocracy.

We're going to talk about the role of luck, talent and hard work. It might not be quite the mixture that you think. Why we tend to minimize the role of luck in our success, how to maximize our luck in life, of course, by way of concepts outside that of talent and work, and ways to look at the luck factor and turn it to our advantage.

Enjoy this episode with Robert H. Frank and of course, if you're new to the show, we'd love to send you some top episodes and the AOC toolbox where we discuss things like reading body language, having charismatic, nonverbal communication, negotiation techniques, the science of attraction, networking, influence strategies, mentorship, persuasion tactics and everything else that we teach here at the Art of Charm.

Check that out at the Art of Charm.com slash toolbox also at the Art of Charm.com slash podcast. You can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show. All right, here's Robert H. Frank.

Well, thanks for being here with us today as well. And it seems like speaking of luck, you're actually kind of lucky to be here after what happened on a tennis court one day. Why don't we start with that?

Sure, I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and co-author, Tom Gillovich is his name. He's a psychologist here at Cornell.

It was November. It was cold out. He tells me that during the second set as we sat during a changeover, I complained about feeling nauseated and then the next thing he knew he tells me I had rolled off the bench. I'm lying still on the tennis court. No breath, no pulse.

He realized that something gravely is the matter. He flipped me over onto my back. He called out for others to call 911 and then he started pounding on my chest.

And he said that after a long time, what seemed like a long time, he got a cough out of me. But then I went limp again and he was about to give up hope when in through the front door, the tennis facility burst the EMT crew. They cut my shirt off me. They put the paddles on me.

They loaded me onto a gurney and took me to the hospital in an ambulance. From there, I was flown to a larger hospital in Pennsylvania. They put me on ice overnight. Three or four days later, I was told by doctors that I had suffered an episode of Sudden Cardiac Death. They don't understand exactly what causes that to happen. But most of the time when it happens, unless you get immediate attention, you die right there on the spot.

The fact that I made it was attributable to an extraordinarily low odds event. It was that before I collapsed on the court, there had been two auto accidents that occurred near the tennis center.

Ambulances had been dispatched from town, which was five or six miles away. Normally it would take 30, 40 minutes to get an ambulance to a site out in the country.

One of the accidents wasn't serious. And so when the call came in that they had a serious case at the tennis center, the driver of that second ambulance was able to peel off, come to my aid, only a few hundred yards from where he was. And except for that immediate attention, I would be among the 98% of people who were in the hospital.

Who don't survive episodes of cardiac deaths? Wow. So two other people's terrible luck in that they got an occur accident combined with your terrible luck in that you got something that's 98% fatal far away from medical attention, combined to create what is relatively speaking a piece of good luck for you.

Exactly. Now my late mother would have said I was destined to survive. You know, that's not the way I've ever thought about things like that. I think I was the beneficiary of pure dumb luck. But you know, people have different ways of parsing events like that. And I don't quarrel with anybody's point of view on that. I think I was lucky.

Right. Yeah, I would imagine destiny doesn't figure into your calculations as an economist too often. Yeah, I think we're low on the destiny scale. It's a profession.

Why is the topic important? I mean, it seems strange to start a show about luck and success with you almost dying and other people getting into car crashes.

But the topic itself is important because there's a lot of discussion around luck both in the political sphere in the business sphere and the economic sphere.

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