Hello, everybody. It's Sam from Financial Samurai. And I just wanted to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. This is the best time of year, my favorite time of year, because I feel so grateful for all of you guys and my family and my friends. And it's about just appreciating what we have and telling others why we do appreciate them.

I was just reading this article on Harvard Business Review called "Stop Making Gratitude All About You." The bottom line from the article is that you should use gratitude not only to appreciate the world more, but also to strengthen your relationships with those you rely on. So expressing gratitude to someone who helps you keeps them interested and invested in having a relationship with you over the long haul.

This is truly important. So think about the people you care about the most-- your spouse, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your parents, your relatives, and your close friends. When was the last time you told them, hey, I really appreciate you always being there for me when I have a problem?

Or I really appreciate you being flexible, coming to play tennis with me on my schedule. Or I really appreciate you always looking after our little one, because I trust you more than anyone else in the world. And I thought a little bit more about this article and how narcissistic it is for me to do this podcast and also to write all these posts all these years.

Because I would say about 30% to 40% of my posts and podcasts are what's going on in my life and what I'm doing. And so that kind of takes a narcissistic personality, to be frank, right? But hopefully you guys appreciate some of my thought process that I want to share with you guys when it comes to investing in the stock market or real estate market or building a business online or whatnot.

And that helps you, motivate you to do something, and also helps you hopefully build wealth over the long term. I'm obviously not going to get everything right, which is why it's so powerful to share my thoughts and feelings and ideas with all of you so I can get really critical feedback.

So I'm really grateful for those of you who really give it to me and call me out and say, hey, you know what? You're totally missing this viewpoint. Or hey, why don't you do this? You didn't think about this. I don't appreciate so much the people who are kind of nasty in their feedback.

But those of you who really lay out some really thoughtful feedback, I really appreciate it. And I think other readers do as well, because there are tons of people just reading the comments, lurking around, or listening to this podcast or whatnot. And they're thinking, uh-huh, I never thought about that before.

And that's a really, really powerful, powerful way of living. There's an interesting story by Ray Dalio. He's the head of this $170 billion hedge fund. And when he first started out, what he realized was that there were a lot of yes men, yes women, who didn't really counteract anything he said.

And then eventually, he got something really wrong, and his company almost closed down. And this is when he thought, well, you know what? I better get some outside perspectives. And so now, in all his board meetings, he has radical transparency where his colleagues and other senior executives and just the junior guys just say, hey, Ray, that was a terrible investment thesis.

You missed this, this, this, and that. And the whole idea of it is to avoid groupthink and avoid having all these yes people just agree with whatever you say. And I really don't want that as well. I don't want every single reader to agree with what I say or what I believe.

We're all different. We all have different opinions, beliefs, goals. And I think that's what makes Financial Samurai and the community special. So please keep on providing honest feedback. I love it. To me, to other people in the community, in a respectful way, we can all learn from each other.

Financial freedom, I think, is an inevitability for all of us. It's like my old favorite Chinese saying, if the direction is correct, sooner or later, you'll get there. I also want to use this podcast to highlight how our wealth, I think, is mostly due to luck. Now, it's interesting because I wrote this post that got a lot of reaction and some quite negative.

One person was like, I absolutely disagree with your thesis that wealth is mostly due to luck. And I am unsubscribing from your Facebook page. And I was thinking to myself, wow, I guess I really touched a nerve. But my belief is that wealth, above average wealth, I would say is 70% due to luck and 30% due to effort.

You can call it hard work, effort, whatever you want to call it. Let's not kid ourselves here. I think we're really, really lucky to be alive. Many of us come from the United States or another developed country. And we just have so much opportunity compared to billions of other people.

And I think the key is to recognize how lucky we are so we never take luck for granted. For example, I've got this cough. And frankly, it's kind of hard to speak. I'm taking pauses here and there because it just tickles my throat. And I got it from my boy who's been sick off and on for the past couple of months because he's in preschool now.

And those viruses and bacteria just transfer over to the parents. And it bums me out. But you know what? I'm going to do this podcast anyway because I don't want to take the ability to record this podcast and share my thoughts with you for granted. I promised myself and I promised all of you guys that I would record at least one podcast a week for the whole year and just see how it goes.

And I'm going to do that because half the battle is just showing up and continuing to go on and on no matter what. So I don't want to take my luck for granted. And I wanted to share some really lucky points in my life that has helped me achieve financial independence a little bit sooner than average.

So first of all, my biggest lucky break was that I was born into a stable dual-parent household. My parents worked in the US Foreign Service, which enabled me to live in five countries before coming to America at age 14. And they also speak Mandarin, So with this type of background, I mean, chances are greater you'll be able to speak a couple languages, interact with people from dozens of cultures, adopt a zest for travel, be more understanding towards people of different cultures, and have a broader world view.

And because of this background, I think it's helped me get a job easier. After all, I joined the International Equities Department at a major investment bank. And I don't know if a non-target school alumni could have got this job if I didn't have this international background. I screwed up a lot in high school, a lot.

You know, I was caught shoplifting. I did a lot of other illegal things with my buddies. This was a public high school. I got suspended for fighting. All these things that I look back and I'm thinking to myself, man, I was a juvenile delinquent. I mean, I did study hard, but only after freshman year when I got in real lot of trouble.

And I paid for my transgressions. But the College of William and Mary gave me a chance, and I'll never forget it. And it was not that easy, because think about your time in college, where you got in trouble in high school. And you didn't know whether all your hard work in college, trying to get those good grades, would mount to anything.

Because, hey, what kind of employer would want to take a chance on you? But again, I got lucky again, and I got a great job in New York City. And it was all because of this one woman, Kim Perkis, who believed in me. She pushed me along in the recruiting process, brought me into various desks, didn't give up on me.

I had 55 interviews, not because the process was that elaborate, but because I just kind of stunk at interviewing with various desks. I interviewed on the US trading floor. What else did I do? The derivatives desk. I had no business interviewing with those guys. And then on the internationals desk.

So I was just getting thrown around left and right. And I don't think anybody really believed in me, except for this one woman. Other lucky breaks. During the 2000 dot com boom, I invested in VCSY, a Chinese internet stock that climbed 50x. I mean, that was nuts. I invested 3,000 and went to 170,000.

And I sold it for 155,000, just because I was like, well, I don't want to lose all my money. And then a year later, the stock basically went to a penny. So that was a really lucky break. And if you go and read the post, I highlighted 15 lucky breaks.

And what I want to do is really encourage you guys to look back in your lives and highlight what are those lucky breaks that have helped get you to where you are now. And it feels really great. Every time we do this, or every time I do this once a year, or maybe once a quarter, it just makes me feel so much more appreciative.

And I get pumped up to try harder. And the best lucky break that I've gotten was meeting my wife in college. We met in Japanese 101 class. So this is how Financial Samurai started, I think, back in 1998. That's right. I was a senior. She was a freshman. I wanted a cruise so I could just relax my senior and find a job.

And it was so fortuitous to meet her, because we ended up dating and sticking together for over 20, 21 years now. And that's really, really a lucky break, finding your life partner so early on when you're so young, when you both have pretty much nothing, and then just going through the cycles of life together, the ups and downs.

It's so much easier to live when you have a partner who's always supporting you, who can be there for you when you have rough days, who can encourage you to keep on going, and just to play off each other's energy and strengths. It's such a blessing, because I do the front end on Financial Samurai, and she does a lot of the back end-- the taxes, the finances, the admin stuff.

And I just couldn't continue for so long without her. So I'm really, really blessed. And I hope we have 40-plus more years together. I really hope none of us take so much of our good luck for granted. I'm trying my best not to. And the best way I can appreciate my luck is to make an ongoing commitment to keep Financial Samurai running, whether through writing, or through this podcast, or responding to comments, and emails, and so forth.

There's a lot of work involved, but I'm going to continue so long as I'm able. Because frankly, I know a lot of people who are unable, whether it's because they can't speak, they can't see well, they can't come up with ideas, whatever it is, I will not take my vision, my voice, my mind, my body for granted.

And I hope none of you guys do as well. Roughly 15% of the world's population has some sort of disability. That's a billion people, folks. Meanwhile, out of that 1 billion, 200 million have a severe disability where it really impedes normal everyday functioning. So let's not forget our brothers and sisters.

If we are able-bodied people, let's just keep on going. Let's use what we've got and do our best, and also help those who do not have what we have. Sooner or later, we're all going to get unlucky. And when we do, we must accept bad luck as a part of life.

But we should also remind ourselves during bad times about all the lucky breaks we've experienced so far. Then we've got to rise up and just move on and just keep on going. So I'd love to hear about all your lucky breaks in your lifetime in the comments section, or an email, or in the forums.

And I want to know how much you think luck plays a part in your success. I have a survey in the post that has about 3,700 entries. And it looks like the number one vote-getter is that luck plays 50% to 69% a part of your success and wealth. The number two vote-getter-- it's interesting-- it's only 25%, 49% luck.

And the number three vote-getter, 70% to 89% is luck. So I want to thank everyone once again for all your support all these years. Without you, Financial Samurai would not have been possible, because I really feed off interaction and feedback. It's just so fun. Every day I wake up, I'm excited to see what happened in the world and on financialsamurai.com.

It kind of feels like Christmas every morning when I was a kid. And I'm feeling really blessed to have that feeling every single day. So thanks so much, and I'll see you guys around.