How A Traffic Stop Changed My Life: The Role of Luck in Financial Outcomes

This time last year, I went to a Zoom meeting that would change the rest of my life (well, at least the life I know about so far).

The CEO of Morning Brew, Austin Rief, had reached out and asked if I’d be interested in chatting about my year-old side project, Money with Katie. After talking for a few minutes, he cut to the chase: “I want to convince you to come do this, but for us.” 

After weeks of Zoom conversations (including one I attended virtually from a hotel room on Thanksgiving morning), we signed an “acquihire” contract the day after my 27th birthday. 

Practically overnight, I went from working my full-time job in content design and building Money with Katie on nights and weekends to being a full-time content creator with a generous contractual security blanket, binding me to a benevolent media company safety net (and health insurance plan) for 36 months. 

This classic “success story” is almost so cookie-cutter that I have to double-check sometimes that it’s actually happening to me, and that it’s not some cubicle daydream. My November 2022 life would have been almost unrecognizable to me from my November 2019 vantage point.

But the popped champagne, spilled tears, and breathless, “Holy shit, I can’t believe this is happening”s that filled our kitchen when I signed the contract were not solely the culmination of a month’s worth of Zoom negotiations and lawyer-approved emails.

In fact, it probably never would have happened had I not gotten a traffic citation three years earlier.

Wait, what? A traffic citation?

Sometimes, we mischaracterize luck

That’s because my internet friendship with Morning Brew’s CEO didn’t begin in November 2021—it began in the spring of 2018, when I was pulled over for reading Morning Brew at a red light. 

A few expletives later (and after safely parking my vehicle at work), I tweeted to let @morningbrew know just how much I loved their product—enough to pay a $150 citation to read it from my phone at a red light.

Austin noticed, followed me back, and DM’d me: 

“Hey,” he said, “That’s hilarious. We’re going to pay for the ticket.” 

And thus began an internet rapport—a loose, random connection that almost wasn’t, but a connection that meant when I launched Money with Katie two years later, it appeared on a feed of content mainlined to Austin’s phone. 

Had I not been pulled over that day, I’m not sure we would’ve ever crossed paths.

Had I not tweeted about it, I doubt he would’ve ever seen Money with Katie on his feed.

Had he not been the guy manning the Brew’s Twitter account back then, I’d probably be sitting here at 1pm on a Thursday working on an app disclosure screen for Meta (if I weren’t laid off!), not on this blog post.

It was dumb fucking luck. 

We make thousands of decisions every single day—the problem is, we don’t know which ones are consequential

We pick the early flight instead of the late one. We go for a run down this street and not that one. We try the new coffee place on the corner, or we go for kombucha instead.

If you sit back and consider the sheer number of choices you’re faced with on a daily basis, it’s enough to make you curse The Butterfly Effect and hide in your room. It’s dizzying, because we never know which choice is going to catapult our lives in a completely different direction.

A traffic citation is innocent (albeit stupid) enough; at the time, I beat myself up over it for the remainder of the week, taking it as proof that I’m bad at following rules and if I weren’t always running so late all the time maybe I wouldn’t have felt like I needed to check email in the car, plus a number of other “adult” things I considered myself “bad at” at the time.

In retrospect now, though, it’s clear just how fateful—how significant—that seemingly insignificant stupid decision was. 

And sure—maybe Austin and I would’ve crossed paths some other way. Maybe I’ll look back on my decision to pursue Money with Katie full-time someday and consider it the humble beginnings of totally different, exciting things. Maybe the path I’d be on right now had I not been pulled over that day (and tweeted about it) would be infinitely cooler, better, and more enriching (though, seems hard to beat).

But I have no way of knowing, because I did get pulled over. I did tweet about it. And I did decide to take him up on it—and as a result of that sequence of events, I’ve reached a state of career fulfillment at age 27 that I could’ve only dreamed of just a few years ago while fighting tooth and nail for a 15% raise on a $52,000 salary.

Yes, I built Money with Katie in obscurity for 18 months before anyone looked twice at it (and to suggest I’m not still toiling away in relative obscurity is a stretch), and sure, that took some work. 

And many of us are pretty willing to admit where privilege has positively impacted our outcomes, but we often ignore the massive role of another factor that blindly bestows good or bad things upon us: luck.

To acknowledge luck’s role in our lives is to acknowledge we aren’t always the ones in control

One of the best pieces I’ve read about luck was a beautiful, thought-provoking exploration of a very tragic day: “It’s hard to come away from the stories of 9/11 with a sense of anything other than an appreciation for the role randomness plays in our daily existence,” writes Garrett Graff for The Atlantic. 

But there are plenty of positive examples, too: Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in America with computer programming terminals. Gates himself estimates there were probably only 50 other students on Earth who had access to the same technology he did, and it was just the dumb luck of where he was born and attended school.  

Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin when he accidentally left a Petri dish open during a holiday break and a specific type of mold fell into it and killed the bacteria, and 200 million lives have been saved as a result.

This is—for obvious reasons—incredibly disconcerting. We want to believe we’re the ones in control, that we’re the ones calling the shots. That our hard work (combined with, for some of us, privilege) will be enough to shepherd us toward the fate we deserve.

That if we work hard enough, and long enough, and sacrifice enough, we’ll be guaranteed the financial outcomes we are rightfully owed. The careers of our idols. The portfolios of our dreams.

To believe anything else would probably prove too demoralizing. 

Even the year you’re born determines how rich you become

Any time we talk about the bouquet of shortest ends of the stick that millennials collectively hold, there’s a glint of a silver lining that typically follows. Somewhere, deep down, I think we all believe we’ll still end up just as wealthy as the Boomers a few decades ahead of us. We hope that some intervening force—be it luck, privilege, or hard work—will correct the decades of bad breaks.

But even the stock market is not equally magnanimous to every generation of investors. It does not bequeath the same average annualized market returns on every retiree who skates into Naples, Florida on a Roth IRA and a dream.

As Nick Maggiulli points out, the year you’re born can be a pretty substantial determinant of how much wealth you accrue over your lifetime, all else being equal: Luck matters more than you think. 

Check this out:

Two people holding the exact same index fund for the exact same amount of time will have wildly different outcomes, depending on when they start.

Things smooth a little when you zoom out by 40 years, but there are still generations of investors who were far luckier than others:

Luck keeps us humble and hopeful

I can trace one of my most significant life events to a traffic stop four years ago, and you know what? That keeps my ass in line. 

The randomness of my lucky break hinged on an almost non-event—nobody knows how things would’ve played out if I didn’t break the law that day. 

Acknowledging the key role of randomness—from the year you’re born to the age you are when you stumble across your first piece of financial advice, to which obscure tweet makes it in front of the right person at the right time—reminds us that we are not the only ones responsible for the good things that happen to us.

Conversely, our decisions aren’t always to blame when things go wrong. That can help us remain hopeful for the future, and avoid the self-loathing that so often accompanies the belief that our lives are the perfect, equalized manifestations of our choices and nothing more.

As Mariel Beasley of the Common Cents Lab said in this interview for The Money with Katie Show, “We like to think that it’s our good decisions that are to thank for our positive financial outcomes, but a lot of the time, we’re just exposed to the right environments.” 

And what’s true about the environments we often find ourselves in? They’re also the result of dumb luck: The college that happened to be recruiting from your high school, the workplace that was hiring for your skill set the year you graduated, the family responsible for birthing you into this world…the year you were born!

Hard work works, but luck works, too.

To quote Seneca: “Luck equals preparation plus opportunity.” If you work hard to lay the groundwork, you’ll be ready when opportunity knocks—you just can’t control when it’ll go trick-or-treating in your neighborhood.