But there’s another that can’t be left off the list, according to Google billionaire Eric Schmidt: luck.
“I would say I’m defined by luck, and I think almost anyone who’s successful has to start by saying they were lucky,” said Schmidt on the Conversations with Tyler podcast. “Lucky of birth, lucky of having intellectual and intelligent family home life, upbringing, global upbringing, etc.”
Schmidt’s own life is an example: To start with, his father was an economist who moved the family to Italy when Schmidt was young. “And this is at a time when people didn’t travel the way they do today, and so it was quite exotic to grow up Italian, and I think that really changed me,” he said.
It opened up his view of the world. “As an American, I’ve always thought Americans were very, very locally focused, and even today in the world you all live in, we’re still too locally focused and not globally focused,” Schmidt said.
Then, there was his schooling.
Schmidt, now 63, studied architecture at Princeton University, though that major didn’t last.
“I was a terrible architect,” Schmidt told Cowen. “But I turned out to be a pretty good engineer, and this was at a time when computer science didn’t exist. At Princeton, I walked in and I said, ‘Look, I think I’d rather do computers.’”
Schmidt went on to graduate with an electrical engineering degree and then got his masters and Ph.D in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
It was perfect timing — the fact that computer industry was just getting started was absolutely key to his success.
“I had the benefit of being early in the computer industry, so that’s like super luck,” said Schmidt.
Indeed, his ability to pursue his interest in computers drove the rest of his career. Schmidt, who is worth about $12.7 billion according to Forbes, went on to be the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet until he stepped down in January 2018 to be a technical adviser.
Schmidt also says he was lucky “because I had good taste in friends, and they helped me out.”
Schmidt did not specify which friends, but earlier in the podcast, Schmidt said he learned about charismatic leadership working with Scott McNealy, a co-founder and former CEO of the computer technology company Sun Microsystems. Also, during his time at Google, Schmidt worked with the co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“The best things in your life will come from the people that you hang out with,” Schmidt said. “That has worked incredibly well for me.”
With his good luck, Schmidt was savvy, he says, and that created his good fortune. “But my real opportunity is, I look at each of these stages, I was picked early, I worked with smart people, people took a risk on me, and I learned.”
Schmidt is not the only ultra successful person to acknowledge how the luck of their upbringing has played a significant role in their success.
“My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest. [Both] my children and I won what I call ‘the ovarian lottery,’” Warren Buffett, who is now worth more than $79.1 billion according to Forbes, told Christiane Amanpour in 2010.
“I was born in the right country at the right time,” said Buffett, now 88.