How to Find Luck

How to Find Luck

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 areaIntrinsic luckiness
Do more stuffObtain more skills
Make it public
Meet more people
Unknown artist: found on Facebook

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