Asked to reveal his secret for his success John D. Rockefeller (or J. Paul Getty) famously said, ”Get up early, work late … and strike oil.” Seriously, did the oil fortunes of the families residing in the Middle East come from hard work, or did they simply happen to live above the vast riches of their oil fields?

LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT

The question seems to assume that the top 1% can totally determine where life takes them, for better or worse. The Quora topic Cause and Effect examines whether a person totally controls his or her life. Physicist Robert Brown wrote:

“We all have a lot less ‘free will’ than we think we do. Of course we can’t help this being true given that we have none at all. But we have even less than it feels like we have, as our choices are always constrained in obvious ways by what the exterior world is doing (in ways we cannot possibly control with all of the will free or otherwise in the world),…”

LUCK AND RANDOMNESS

For the richest people, luck plays a big role about their position in life. One article states, “Less than 5% actually make it. And many of those do it the traditional way: they inherit it. About 60% of U.S. household wealth is inherited. Between a quarter and a third of Forbes 400 billionaires acquired their wealth that way. It may not be the most common path, but it’s widespread, and it’s certainly the easiest way.”

A recent study by Gabriel Zucman shows about 60% of the wealthiest people were fortunate enough to have wealthy parents, although the exact number depends on the time and place.

HOW SIMILAR ARE THE TOP 1%?

How many people actually compromise the top 1% of the population? The United States currently has 346,000,000 inhabitants and the world 8,000,000,000 of them, so 3,460,000 people in the US and 80,00,000 people in the world make the cut. Using an average family size of 2.5, the numbers give 1,400,000 top 1% United States family units, while the world has 32,000,000 families among the top 1%.

Turns out the people in the famous Forbes 400 list comprises a tiny part of all of the top 1% rich people. The lesser-known members could be filed as “The Silent Minority,” i. e. those who don’t publicize the secrets to their successes (that’s why they’re secrets).

SOME COMMON VIEWS OF BECOMING RICH

So what’s something the 1% richest people understand? Maybe they realize that they were lucky enough to have wealth given to them, and then NOT squander it. Others were fortunate enough to marry their way into rich families or situations (good for them). Some well-known ones actually achieved fame and fortune through hard work, and aren’t shy about advertising the fact.

IS LIFE FAIR?

An article from MIT ruminates on the eternal question of how unfair life seems to be for most people, “But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth?”

The conclusion they reach trades the traditional principle of cause and effect for the quantum world of randomness: “It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones,” they [Pluchino et al] say. “And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones.”

ROCKEFELLER THANKFUL FOR CHEATING HIS CERTAIN DEMISE

Rockefeller was America’s first billionaire and questionably wealthiest of all Americans, with riches worth 2% of the nation’s GDP. He never would have achieved that status if he made his appointment with a doomed train bound for Buffalo, New York, than left from his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio in 1867.

The last car of that train went off the tracks over a bridge in Angola, New York. As detailed in this account of the Angola Train Horror, the car slid down into a gorge catching fire along the way and killing 49 passengers in the process.

“Rockefeller was 28, a successful young businessman already widely known in Cleveland and the oil refining industry… Although his plans were meticulously arranged, Rockefeller pulled into Cleveland’s Union Station just a few minutes too late; his bags made the train but he didn’t, and it saved his life.”

Afterwards Rockefeller wrote to his wife Laura, “We certainly should have been in the burned car as it was the only one that went that we could have entered at the time we would have arrived at the station. I am thankful, thankful, thankful.”

G.W. PLUNKITT ON SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES

The most fortunate people understand and appreciate the opportunities good luck gives them. As Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkitt colorfully phrased it:

“EVERYBODY is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft…. There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”