Mr. Berman was my mentor and family friend for a stretch of my life. My mother was an academic advisor at Penn, and she had made it her personal mission to help his children succeed. That's the thread that connected our worlds, hers through her work, his through the trust he placed in her.
We came from completely different worlds. I grew up in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania, a blue collar town outside Philadelphia where people worked with their hands and didn’t spend a lot of time in the kinds of rooms Mr. Berman moved through. He was the founder of Palisade Capital. We met by chance, which is either the whole story or no part of it, depending on how you think about luck.
He took a liking to me. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. At some point he handed me the keys to his Ferrari and let me drive it.
I always called him Mr. Berman. He called me Billy, the only person outside my family who ever did. I never asked him to stop.
He had a thing he’d say: “Luck is at the intersection of opportunity and preparedness.”
He didn’t say it as inspiration. He said it the way you say something you’ve simply worked out, matter-of-fact, a little impatient with anyone who hadn’t gotten there yet. That’s how most of what he said landed.
I kept that relationship private for most of my career. I was never a name-dropper and I’m not starting now. I’m writing this because he’s gone, and because the thing he told me about luck is one of the most useful frameworks I’ve carried, and it belongs to him.
The standard model of luck treats it as a fixed variable. You have it or you don’t. You were born into the right situation or you weren’t. When someone succeeds, the easy explanation is that they got lucky, which is another way of saying you’ve stopped thinking about it.
Mr. Berman’s formulation does something different. Break luck into its actual parts and you find two things: opportunity and preparedness.
Opportunity isn’t entirely yours to control, but you’re not passive either. You choose which rooms you walk into. You decide where your attention goes. You can move closer to where things are happening or further away; that part is yours.
Preparedness is entirely yours. Nobody builds that for you. Nobody takes it from you.
What most people call luck is what happens when those two things arrive at the same time. Stop treating it as something that visits you. Build the half you own, and stay close to where the other half moves.
The Ferrari story matters for what it actually was. Two people from completely different places, meeting by accident, one of them choosing to extend genuine trust to the other for no obvious reason. There was nothing in it for him.
That’s what I come back to most. Not the car. The fact that he saw something and acted on it without needing a reason to.
Mr. Berman, I think about that intersection more than you know. You were already at it. You helped me find my way there.
Nobody calls me Billy anymore.
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