Create optimal conditions for lucky things to happen to you (2020)
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The beginning of college coincided with my recovery from an episode of depression, and I guess fueled rebound energy, I started prospecting. I just said yes to as many things as I could. It didn't take long for this to start paying dividends, and I started getting lucky.
By the end of college, I could see how luck compounds. I think the world is very random, practically speaking, but that probably distributions are highly mutable. I found that decisions I previously made set me up for higher likelihood of being chosen for subsequent opportunities. I parlayed this into getting a grad school fellowship that took me to an Ivy League university, needless to say, that opens further doors.
Suddenly, I was quite lucky, and I've remained lucky for my adult life to this day.
This, incidentally, is the problem with meritocracy. Meritocracy showers opportunities on the lucky, rather than the needy or the deserving or even the highest leverage. For the privileged (as I am, in many ways), this starts before birth. Merit is manufactured and compound. Success justifies the perception of merit, but ignores the extent to which successful people are often the beneficiaries of massive overinvestment.
Nonetheless, this is the system we live in, and I think it's good for people to know how to navigate it.
> Yes Man is a memoir written by Danny Wallace based upon a year of the author's life, in which he chose to say "Yes" to any offers that came his way.
> ... furthers his career by saying "yes" in meetings with executives.
Also read his other books, they are good.
i recommend figuring out a happy middle between the two rather than swinging thru the extremes.
further nuance - keeping the option of saying yes (as opposed to directly saying yes) also has a carrying cost: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/25/desai-commencem...
Btw I'm not arguing against the people that are in need and under-privileged, I totally get your point on that.
Lucky people often appear very capable (crazy bets that just happen to pay off look like skill to less statistically trained people), as do the politically skilled (if you can convince someone that you're capable, you don't actually have to be).
We use apparent "merit" as a proxy for aptitude, and that leads to a rich get richer effect, because merit, at the time of evaluation, is often inflated by overinvestment. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, I think there are a huge number of false negatives in our meritocracy games.
As a hiring manager, I've taken advantage of this for years. I look for proxies for potential, rather than present capability. That allows me to acquire underpriced, overlooked talent.
I had a tough start in mine (likely starting in childhood with trauma), and that issue worsened significantly through formative years of my life. It didn't ease up. As a young adult, being pretty ill and left untreated can reveal formidable powers of self-destruction.
Luck was there however, in the form or only succeeding partially through the little talent or brains I had in between depressive oscillations. Eventually with the untreated illness however that too can reach its limits. Eventually I still got lucky again, in the form of meeting a couple people who love unconditionally and a therapist who jumped into the fray and was creative with meds. These days I can almost see what it might be like on the other side of the fog for others, and I agree with your post and attitude overall.. But I'm not surprised. Empathy isn't a muscle we all work reliably, and it can be hard to constantly see it and retain equanimity (especially having some for everybody, in or outgroups, self or others).
With meds and therapy and work and time, I do think thatwith or without the depression, I can attempt to create my luck by living through principles that seed it. In my opinion those principles include living moment-to-moment lightly (some stoicism, some absurdist nihilism), and living moments profoundly in their value (anything is an opportunity, most things can be experienced deeply). A bit like a good boxer is light on their feet but heavy on the impacts.
But I was lucky for a bunch of other reasons too. Some were manufactured, other the result of privilege and chance.
Incidentally, one of the things that helped me climb out of my depression was meeting a couple new friends who were very accepting of me. That happened at an event that I was at through one of the few activities I had chosen for myself to be involved in in high school. So it's actually a good example of opening myself up to the chance of a lucky event working out.
I really feel for folks who have had a worse experience of depression than me and I'm happy to hear you have experienced improvement of the worst of your depression.
Indeed. That quote from Sun Tzu's 'Art of War' - Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
One the great things about the GTD system is to make you arrive at the exponentially increasing opportunity trees. Once you act on something, think about the next task(s), when you finish them, think about the next- ad infinitum. Prune the tree every weekend based on your larger goals.
A few weeks to months of this you will have enough opportunities opening up for you which were previous invisible, and way out of your sight.
That's the underlying philosophy of things like GTD. It's not just about doing what's in front of you, but opening up new possibilities.
Lucky and particularly the politically skilled!
If you don't know the secret codes or secret power holders, you're just stuck on the outside looking in. And these secret codes have little to nothing to do with actual ability.
TLDR even if you write code for a living, your career is still all about people.
My point remains: do good work and don't neglect connecting w people and making good impressions; relationships w colleagues are essential to a strong career.
It seems we're discussing two separate things.
In my eyes the real problem is not whether there is an "in group" as you say, but whether there is gatekeeping and what it is based on. Do people just happen to have the right surname, gender or skin color? Or is it really about engaging, kind, fun personalities who are competent and hard working. If it is the former, then it is not a good group to be part of at all. But the latter describes a group that is based on merit.
It depends on how that's done. You can have someone who "demonstrates" that stuff via manipulation. Those people are generally not great for achieving whatever your company goal is. While they might be an asset today, they can turn.
Gatekeeping is an issue too. But even if you eliminate those, a random candidate will almost always lose to a personally known candidate due to observation bias. The gatekeepers aspects are a part of this too - you are more likely to be in the "known" category if you share the same attributes as the manager.
First, it has no ability to differentiate merit manufactured by previous iterations of the meritocracy game from other forms of potential or reasons to invest in a person or reward them.
Second, it implicitly devalues people who seem to be lacking in merit, amplifying the effects of any sort of disadvantage. I don't know that a society based on merit can ever truly be humanitarian. This plays out in very visible ways, in America, the most meritocratic of cultures. We tolerate an astounding amount of completely avoidable misery.
As an American, steeped in meritocratic thinking from birth, it's frankly scary and disorienting to imagine what things would be like if you took meritocracy off its pedestal. I think you'd see a happier society, but also a loss of the economic competitive edge that is the source of our power in the world. Meritocracy might truly be our state religion and the main thing that binds this country together.
Except it's still a grind and I haven't experienced any compounding luck. Just exercises in endless nail pulling.
Is it possible that you just... Got lucky?
So much this!
I am the child of a black, single mother who didn't have a High School diploma. Statistically speaking, I shouldn't be where I am (being offered interviews for Director-level positions at software companies). You have to do whatever you can to turn circumstance in your favor. Don't turn down any help anyone wants to offer.
Matthew 25:29
Advocates of meritocracy seem to forget that it wasn't coined as a positive term.
In my experience one of the easiest ways someone can increase their luck surface area is through networking and cold emails. Knowing lots of people doing cool stuff and occasionally reaching out to people who have been successful is imo one of the best ways to increase your own chances of success in life.
I also think it helps to imagine the "luck surface" as a fairly non-uniform thing. People often underestimate how unconventional paths to success can be. For example, I had a weirdo friend who a decade ago kept telling me about this thing called Ethereum and how I needed to get in on something called an "ICO" because it was going to be "the next big thing". At the time I was so dismissive of the idea, but I've seen unconventional interests like this work out for people enough times now that I always try to keep an open mind these days.
To expand on the luck surface area concept a little, in search optimisation there's a trade off between exploration and local optimisation (eg, hill climbing). If a search algorithm focuses too much on exploring the global search landscape it tends to spend a lot of time in non-optimal areas, but if it spends too much time climbing the nearest hill then it tends to get trapped in local optimums. I think this is true of life too. The traditional path to success probably focuses too much on hill climbing and doesn't spend enough time considering unconventional alternatives where there exists potential for much larger rewards. In addition to thinking about the surface area of luck I think there is also some value in thinking about how you're exploring that surface area.
- nice visualization of lick surface area https://twitter.com/elzr/status/1381105950602461189
- https://museapp.com/podcast/53-career/
- scooped by sahil bloom https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1495079113115451392 (and dalton did another video more focused on YC founders https://youtu.be/NmEyx9TEkRw)
- another good perspective on luck https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1550659843882717186
and i cover more career-related aspects of luck/strategy in my book: https://learninpublic.org
If you care what I think - most people stop reading at the "4 types of luck" level (because that's where pmarca, naval et al stop), but what I'm trying to contribute to the conversation is the role of strategy in creating luck. People who are more intentional about their strategic decisions and awareness end up more lucky. But I'll have to prove it thru my own life success since simply arguing it doesnt convince anyone hehe.
I have a gut feeling that hustling is a more effective strategy than being the best. In a winner-takes-all economy, (as many real economies are) you can do an excellent work and go unnoticed because someone else is already capturing all the attention.
You can argue that if that happens is because the other thing is best, but I'm not very convinced about that. Look at HN itself: if a submission manages to get early traction, it is more likely that it will raise to the front page as upvotes attract upvotes, etc.
Ofc, you can try to do both.
Luck is a final jump into desired physical manifestation of desire.
What author is touching upon heavily - is physical part - doing (something).
Another integral part of manifesting is removing conscious and subconscious blocks (beliefs) and practices of being in the state of already manifested desire.
The magic part is a way of getting modern people that aren’t even aware they have an unconscious to directly work with it, by feeling they are working with some external magic.
Importantly, the ability to do this is not something one can automatically do, but requires lots of training and practice, and is also a key goal of most systems of psychological therapy and religious practice. My assertion is that "The Secret" is one such system, and can be viewed as a type of meditation technique.
There are a huge number of psychological methods that aim to work on this goal, whereas the 'swapping colors' thing you mention is not something I have ever seen as a claimed possibility of any method. I'm not sure why you would expect to be able to do that, or why not being able to do that would mean you wouldn't be able to do anything else.
Some of the things we can do are really shocking and cool, but they are still pretty random and mostly discovered by monks, monastics, etc. that were basically exploring random things within themselves. For example, Tummo meditation allows us to raise our body temperature and withstand extreme cold. But we lack a mechanistic understanding of how it all works, so we still can't develop even the simplest things on purpose.
You are really missing something hugely important here by expecting a rational, mechanistic model and understanding of our brain, and dismissing anything else. Monastics don't care how the brain works mechanistically, and that isn't what they have been working on for thousands of years. They have been focused on finding ways to achieve very specific outcomes, and have largely succeeded at that.
For example, in Taoism there is a specific objection to seeking mechanistic understanding for what the methods such as qi gong are actually doing physically in the body. They know that such mechanisms exist, but they explicitly don't care, as it's a temping distraction from achieving mastery at the actual technique. One can become a neuroscientist instead of a qi gong master, but you will have a different set of outcomes, and will not also be a qi gong master. Perhaps someday neuroscience will advance to that level to achieve anything qi gong can do, but it is far from that right now[1].
Modern western medicine for example, despite claiming to be scientific and rational, has also mostly taken this approach. We don't understand enough about the body to correctly explain how most medical treatments work. We only know empirically that they work, and so we use them, with great success despite mostly discovering them with trial and error. In some cases we have supposed explanations, but the explanations are incomplete, and keep changing as our understanding grows, yet the methods continue to work regardless.
Would you refuse to go under general anesthesia during a life saving surgery because we still lack an understanding of how or why it works? I sure would not. Anesthesiologists completely lack a special privileged understanding of how their methods work, and instead focus only on following protocols that have been found to be safe and effective despite a complete lack of biological understanding. The way monastics 'hack the brain' with careful protocols discovered by trial and error is virtually identical to this.
Edit: I am writing all of this because I strongly relate to your perspective, and shared it when I was younger. I am a researcher in a bio-medical field, and developing more respect and understanding of these types of things was a long process I went through, when I used to reject them as irrational BS. I now use some of these methods in my daily life, and have a better quality of life as a result, yet I don't understand them. I am interested in finding funding for research to explore the underlying biological mechanisms.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32444061/one of my favorite classes at Wharton was Richard Shell's the Literature of Success (https://apps.wharton.upenn.edu/syllabi/2016A/LGST227001/) where we, no joke, studied The Secret as a way to understand the "Think and Grow Rich"/manifestation philosophy of success
my favorite joke of his about the topic is "when two sports teams compete against one another, if both manifest their desire really hard, only one can win"
Welcome to the world of parallel realities which is beyond the scope of this thread.
Opportunities frequently come and go in your life. Most people aren't prepared to take advantage of them.
We don't have control over most of the opportunities that appear in our lives. However we have agency over our level of preparedness. Work on being better prepared to recognize and take advantage of the future opportunities that will arise in your life.
Jason's friend Gabriel Weinberg (also the founder of DDG) wrote about Luck Surface Area as one of the portable mental models in his best-seller, Super Thinking (https://amzn.to/3weREdA).
I like patio11 and all but I don't think his guest podcast many years later was key in popularizing the idea. It had also already been mentioned on many podcasts over the entire previous decade and on the front page of HN multiple times.
I felt those names were placed as an "argument from authority" [0] (those are good arguments regardless!); and given the author's background (tech), it isn't completely unexpected that those authoritative figures happen to be VCs / investors. That said, blogs aren't really accurate sources of information, anyway.
Besides, tech twitter is an echo chamber ;)
> I am simply acknowledging my own ideological lineage
>> TFA goes: "A parallel, older school of thought dates back to James Austin in 1978 and was repopularized by Marc Andreesen in 2007, then Naval and Nivi a decade later."
...doesn't only come off as an "acknowledgement", which is the point GP is making.
Yes, but you're also a lot more likely to roll a 1 and run out of bankroll. One could go on and discuss all the points in there but that's a lot of theory crafting that misses the point that created opportunities are not be luck by definition.
Being lucky at all is predicated on being in a good state physically and mentally, which I'm very fortunate to be in at the moment. I think one thing we should all think about is how we can not just maximize our own luck, but use that luck to get other people in a good state as well.
That phrase has become a bit of a motto for me. In my mind, luck has multiple components.
The first is awareness of an opportunity... Noticing the penny.
The second, and possibly the more critical part comes from action. Many people may have seen that opportunity before, but did they act on it? In the simple case of a penny, the answer is no... otherwise it wouldn't be there.
Both parts are required.
This is especially visible when playing against a good computer opponent: the players often accuse the program of cheating the dice, choosing good rolls for the computer and bad rolls for the human. There is even an “Official Backgammon Software Complaint Form” for that. <https://www.bkgm.com/rgb/rgb.cgi?view+546>
[0]: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Here are links to:
- https://www.amazon.com/Luck-Factor-Richard-Wiseman/dp/078686...
I guess the take from the article is that one should try again and again and eventually statistics will take over. But it might be lucky to have the ability to try again and again.
At the beach, waves will hit everyone in their path (right place, right time) but only those that notice it and already have momentum in the direction it's heading are able to ride it. If they have experience, and the tools (a board), they can ride it for longer without crashing.
Flow is being able to recognize when and where opportunities arise and maneuvering yourself there in time-space. Force is the actual mechanistic application of effort to actualize some experience.
Generally speaking, if you have less of one you’ll need more of the other. But I think it’s valuable to consider force as roughly linear and flow as nonlinear. Because force is limited to how much you as a single individual can produce, and flow is the entirety of the world potentially on your side.
Sometimes it’s good to remember relationships and free time are also forms of luck.
Additionally luck implies your actions don’t matter. Whereas fortune/fortunate implies your actions do matter.
Umm, was Bill Gates the only person whose mom had a personal chat with _the CEO of IBM_ about doing business with his company? Probably, yes. Did the IBM people forget to ask for an exclusive license as they had discussed internally? Definitely, yes.
I mean, Gates is smart, worked hard, and _did_ make the most of the luck he got. But pretending he just made better use of the _same sort of luck as everyone else_ is simply untrue.
If you think you got some "virtual success", or eventually "weath success", it considered harmful in long run more often.
I listened to your narrated version, thanks for sharing your stories.
Minutiae: I noticed your anchor for Step 1 needs correcting in the table of contents.