Eric Tian

One idea I’m fascinated by: you can’t control when you’re lucky, but you can increase your odds of finding luck (luck = success based on chance). Some of these luck-promoting activities include:

1. Do more stuff
2. Make it public
3. Meet more people
4. Obtain more skills

And here’s my hypothesis:

Lucky break = Your surface area (points 1-3) * Intrinsic luckiness (point 4).

Let me explain.

1. Do more stuff

Let’s say you’re lucky 10% of the time. That means if you do one new pursuit a year, there’s only a 10% chance that that annual endeavour will have the benefit of chance on your side. Those odds are kind of low.

But if you try 10 or 20 new things a year, you’re almost certain to have pure chance help you along with at least one of those.

It’s about surface area. If you increase your number of activities done, luck will have more opportunities to find you. Your have a greater area for luck to randomly land on.

2. Make it public

The world is big and a lot of it lives on the internet. One of the easiest ways to get lucky is to put yourself out there online.

As Austin Kleon writes in Show Your Work!,
Online, everyone – the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur – has the ability to contribute something.

If you are constantly creating but keep it to yourself, you reduce the odds that something extraordinary will happen thanks to luck. If you share it with the world, you’ll increase your surface area of influence. People, and luck, are more likely to find you.

3. Meet more people

In my eyes, there are two main benefits of meeting new people:

1. You can learn something from them
2. They can learn something from you

From them, you might find a new creative idea to do (point 1), some opportunity to share your work (point 2), or some skill that you could steal for yourself (point 4).

On their end, they might discover something from you that leads to a new opportunity.

This is similar to the point above on making it public. If more people know you, there’s a bigger chance that one of them will be the key factor to some lucky break. You might find an opportunity in your career, dating life or financials.

And of course, if you get along well enough, you might even form a friendship.

4. Obtain more skills

So far, we’ve only discussed ways to increase your surface area. This includes do more stuff (point 1), make it public (point 2) and meet more people (point 3). But there’s also another approach to finding luck, which is increasing your intrinsic luckiness. I believe the easiest way to do this is to obtain more skills.

If you learn a new skill like public speaking, coding, economics or psychology, you’ll generally do things better. You’ll be better at talking to people. You’ll find a more creative way of working. You’ll know the ins-and-outs of a new domain. In this way, your intrinsic chance to find luck dramatically increases, because you’re doing better stuff. Your intrinsic luckiness is higher. In his biography, Scott Adams writes,
Every new skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.

Luck favours the prepared.

On top of this, you’ll also probably develop the confidence to do more stuff (point 1), make it public (point 2) and better talk to people (point 3). This ties together everything in the equation.

Summary

The formula to find luck, and how to maximise your odds:

Lucky break = Your surface area * Intrinsic luckiness

Surface area	Intrinsic luckiness
Do more stuff	Obtain more skills
Make it public
Meet more people

Here are five hypotheses of mine on life (will probably change in the future):

1. The point of a good book is to change the way you view the world and other people. If your views stay the same after finishing a book, it wasn’t meant for you.

2. Many of us severely underestimate the role of health on our happiness. If exercise often, eat clean and sleep well, that’s half of the game won. The rest includes moving towards a higher goal and having the freedom to do what you want, when you want (and probably more factors: TBC).

3. Most of the excuses we make: not enough time, not enough money, not enough knowledge, are just ways to avoid the real bottleneck: not enough courage. There is always a small step to be taken – if only we have the guts to do it.

4. Luck plays an enormous role in our successes but we often misattribute this to forward planning or being “excellent”. This is because it’s easier to accept that someone’s success came from something measurable like hard work, rather than something obscure like luck.

But we can often improve our odds for being lucky by increasing the number of ways luck can find us. If you’re 1% lucky and do 100 things, one of those pursuits is bound to have luck on its side. But if you only do one thing, you’ll almost definitely be unlucky.

5. Good intentions are not good enough. It’s not good enough to want to say something nice – you must say it. It’s not good enough to want to be a good student – you must prove it. It’s not good enough to want to stand up against injustice – you must take action. The world doesn’t know your intentions.

My two biggest productivity killers are YouTube and Chess. Once I’m on either of them, it’s hard to get out: YouTube sucks me into a spiral of recommendations and chess baits me into playing too many games. I’ve tried using extensions to block them but it’s too easy to just go on incognito mode to bypass. The problem is, in that moment, there isn’t much willpower to resist.

But a few days ago, I realised BlockSite lets you redirect a blocked website to another page of your choosing. I thought for a while and decided on this:

It’s just a simple Notion page that took one minute to set up. But whenever I land on this, I get a fat dose of momento mori. The urge to waste my time goes away and I look to more productive behaviours like reading or cleaning my room. I’ve wasted barely any time on YouTube and chess since.

Most of us have activities that eat away our soul but for whatever reason, we do them anyway. My hypothesis is that we just need an extra dose of willpower to help us overcome the temptation in that moment. For destructive behaviour on the internet, this landing page seems to work for me.