Manny Pacquiao's MP Tower, Manny Pangilinan's new Forbes mansion

I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. — Thomas Jefferson

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.  — Harry Golden

How important is luck in the success of people and in the destiny of nations? Luck was one of the topics at a dinner with Century Tuna founder and self-made tycoon Ricardo Po, Sr.

We ate, drank Pu-erh tea and a few small glasses of Shao Xing wine. He described our four-hour exchange of views as zhu jiu lun ying-xiong, which is Mandarin for “drinking wines while discoursing about great men.” This phrase comes from China’s ancient Three Kingdoms era and was used to describe a dinner discourse of General Cao Cao (pronounced “Zhao Zhao”).

Deng Xiaoping, Pacquiao's MP Tower, MVP's new Mansion

Good fortune, great house: Manny Pangilinan is PLDT, Smart, TV5, Meralco, Philex and First Pacific boss. MVP recently bought a mansion in the upscale South Forbes Park neighborhood in Makati near and at a much higher price than Pacquiao’s almost half-billion peso North Forbes Park mansion purchase.

We talked about great Asian heroes like Deng Xiaoping (whom Po described as “an extraordinary leader who changed the destiny and luck of China”), Singapore statesman Lee Kuan Yew, as well as Philippine and international political leaders and business tycoons.

During dinner, Po e-mailed me from his iPhone the Oct. 29 New York Times article by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen, “What’s Luck Got to Do With It?” One of their examples in that article is the good luck of Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.

Among the three luckiest people in the Philippines today are Manny Pacquiao, Manny V. Pangilinan and President Noynoy C. Aquino.

Recently while in the Malate area I went inside an art shop to ask directions to a restaurant for my meeting. The female shopowner replied to my next query about the huge property across M.H. del Pilar Street. She said it was bought last year by boxing champ Manny Pacquiao for P200 million.

The lady shopkeeper added that the rags-to-riches and “very humble” Pacquiao eventually plans to construct his own MP Tower there when all the existing tenants like Mercury Drugstore will have finished their lease contracts. Wow!

Another self-made Manny with lots of money and great luck is PLDT, Smart, TV5, Meralco, Philex and First Pacific boss Manny V. Pangilinan. I heard MVP recently bought a mansion in upscale South Forbes Park in Makati near and at a much higher price than Pacquiao’s almost half-billion-peso North Forbes Park mansion. 

This MVP Forbes Park property straddles three streets and was bought “at a record-shattering price.” Coincidentally, he will have as neighbors his competitors, Atty. Felipe “Henry” Gozon and Menardo “Nards” Jimenez, top stockholders of GMA 7.

Ninoy Used To Worry Of Son’s Future, P-Noy’s Incredible Luck

P-Noy is one of the luckiest guys ever. I realized this even more when I recently chanced upon Mondragon boss and former Tourism Secretary Tony Gonzalez at the Manila Polo Club during the 25th anniversary dinner of Philip Ng’s Ergo furniture business. He recounted that Noynoy’s first job at his Mondragon firm lasted for about two years.

This writer was still a student then soliciting corporate sponsorship for a school organization when I first met Noynoy, who used to have a desk outside the office of Tony Gonzalez at the penthouse of Modragon building. Noy was handling business development for Nike rubber shoes and even tried to sell me rubber shoes on instalment, which I declined.

Gonzalez recalled that his good friend, the late Senator Ninoy Aquino, “used to worry a lot about his only son Noy because he was more into music, was considered introverted or laid-back.” That was in 1981 to 1982, when Gonzalez used to visit the Aquinos in Boston, Massachusetts.

Gonzalez told Ninoy: “It’s not easy to be your son. You have a very unique personality. Please remember that you were in detention while he was growing up. For an only son, that’s a heavy burden. One day you will be very proud of him.”

I remember at the height of the presidential election campaign, P-Noy’s vice-presidential bet Mar Roxas remarked at a dinner that Noy was “talangang anak ng Diyos” (truly a child of God), for Nacionalista Party’s presidential bet Manny Villar was already surging ahead in February 2010 when his momentum was abruptly derailed by Senator Juan Ponce Enrile’s anti-Villar attacks. Mar pointed out that Enrile was former Marcos-era defense minister and also the martial law jailer of P-Noy’s father.  

Who could be more eminently qualified to be Philippine president than Wharton-trained and former New York investment banker Mar Roxas, or UP MBA graduate and self-made tycoon Manny B. Villar, or Harvard-schooled bar topnotcher Gibo C. Teodoro? But for all three, no presidential luck — yet.

In contrast, luck or the amazing confluence and timing of events sparked by ex-President Cory C. Aquino’s death in late 2009 before the deadline for filing election candidacies and the huge outpouring of people’s goodwill for her helped catapult Noynoy to the presidency.

Good luck, I believe, is God’s blessing, a great opportunity of which we are only stewards of. What will the lucky P-Noy do with the remaining years of his presidency? Popularity and good intentions alone cannot reform the Philippines and cannot make him an effective leader.

Will P-Noy muster the guts, pragmatism, political will, vision and hard work to not squander away his fantastic good luck so that he can truly change the Philippines’ future? 

Bill Gates Has Good Luck And High Rol Or “Return On Luck”

On the Bill Gates phenomenon, Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen acknowledged that the Microsoft founder has been lucky for having grown up in an upper middle-class American family, which afforded him the best schools, and that he was born at the right time in the world’s technological history (neither too early nor too late), and with the right access to computing knowhow at an early age.

Collins and Hansen wrote: “The difference between Mr. Gates and similarly advantaged people is not luck. Mr. Gates went further, taking a confluence of lucky circumstances and creating a huge return on his luck. And this is the important difference.”

Both writers added: “Luck, good and bad, happens to everyone, whether we like it or not. But … we see people like Mr. Gates who recognize luck and seize it, leaders who grab luck events and make much more of them.”

After extensive scientific research on numerous successes, Collins and Hansen concluded “that luck doesn’t cause … success. The crucial question is not, ‘Are you lucky?’ but ‘Do you get a high return on luck?’ Return on luck: We call it ROL.”

For the two writers, even bad luck can boost one’s future success by strengthening a person and making him or her gutsier, more determined.

They wrote: “Getting a high ROL requires throwing yourself at the luck event with ferocious intensity, disrupting your life and not letting up. Bill Gates didn’t just get a lucky break and cash in his chips. He kept pushing, driving, working — and sustained that effort for more than two decades. That’s not luck — that’s return on luck.”

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By the way, today, Nov. 13, is World Kindness Day. Why not enhance your good luck or God’s blessings by doing acts of selflessness and kindness to others?

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