How to Win in a World of Limited Opportunities with Judd Kessler

**Guy Kawasaki** (0:00)
Where has time gone? This is the sixth year of the Remarkable People podcast, and I thought maybe it's time to find a revenue model. So if you'd like to sponsor this podcast, please reach out to me. You will be able to reach an audience of highly educated, high income, open-minded, I would even say growth mindset-minded people.
And I will even read the ads or the promotions inside the podcast. We're not just going to slap it on at the beginning and the middle and the end. I will do the reading. One caveat, I will not promote products and services that I do not like. So if you have a remarkable product or service, you are in the right place. Guy at Guy kawasaki.com.
This is Remarkable People.

**Judd Kessler** (0:57)
You have a scarce resource that you're trying to give out. In this case, life-saving care during COVID. The question is, who gets access to that scarce resource? You can ask, is there a way to allocate this scarce resource? So the resource itself becomes less scarce. That is effectively what folks were doing when they were saying, if there's limited COVID care, limited hospital beds, limited ventilators, we should be prioritizing the nurses and the doctors and the first responders who are the ones providing that care. We're able to make them healthier faster, they can get back into the hospitals and continue to offer care. But also because if we make that promise to them, then the folks who might be afraid to come in because they're worried about exposure become less afraid. They know that they will be taken care of if and when they need it. That will actually make it so that more people show up to the hospital to provide the kind of care that we need. It's a tool that we can use much more widely.

**Guy Kawasaki** (1:58)
Good morning, everybody. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast, and for the uptenth time, we're looking for remarkable people to inspire and inform you. And for the uptenth time, we found another remarkable person. His name is Judd Kessler, and he is a professor at Wharton. He's an economist, and he's gonna tell us how to skip the line and get tickets and do all kinds of good stuff. I gotta tell you, Judd, though someday your daughters are gonna read your book and say, Dad, why did you mention me so much in that book? Oh my God, they should get a piece of the royalty, but that's a different discussion.
So listen, he's the author of this very interesting book, and if you're an entrepreneur, you really should read this book.
As you look at his background, you can see he has about 50 copies behind him, but I only have one copy and it's called Lucky By Design. Welcome to Remarkable People, Judd.

**Judd Kessler** (2:59)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Guy Kawasaki** (3:00)
So Judd, first I have to ask you, so the title Lucky By Design, I must admit that after I read your book, I said, well, what does luck have to do with it? You have so much about how you can optimize these things and optimize this, so is this a pun? Is this like an IQ test? You say, I'm gonna make a title that is contrary to the book and I want to see which podcasters are sharp enough to figure out that the title is a contradiction.

**Judd Kessler** (3:31)
You won the game. It is a contradiction. This is my first book and the titling was an interesting process because when I sold the book to the publisher, the book was called Market Rules because the idea was there are these hidden markets, you're playing in them all the time and it is very important to understand the rules that are dictating them so that you can understand those rules, develop a good strategy, and navigate through them. And the publisher at some point was like, look, Market Rules, it reads as too like econ heavy, like maybe it's going to be about financial markets, which the book is not about. My joke, because I understood it was not a perfect title, is people are going to hear me say Market Rules, and think it's rules with a Z, like Market Rules.
So what the folks at the publisher said was, look, the book at its heart is trying to help people have agency in these markets that they play in all the time. And folks who don't have that agency, who don't understand the rules that they're trying to navigate, might think that the outcomes are based entirely on luck, that this person got lucky that they got the seat in the elementary school that I wanted my kid to go to, or they got lucky that they were able to get Taylor Swift tickets when I didn't, or get that reservation at that restaurant or that life-saving organ transplant. So wouldn't it be nice to kind of give people the recognition that this isn't just luck, that they actually have more agency, that they can succeed in these markets by understanding them better?