“Your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.”
How to increase your luck surface area (2010) — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25968751
“success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.”
This is a saying that sounds good, but makes no sense. For example, how do you change your luck of getting a coin to flip 90% of the time on tails?
So you would say that one was lucky if they flipped a coin 10 times and nine times out of 10 It landed on tails when they needed it to land on tails. But you know what? If they needed it to land on heads those nine out of 10 times they would be unlucky.
What you all are talking about is not luck, it’s opportunity. You can increase your opportunity, but your luck never changes.
Exactly. Congrats, you have realized what the point of the article is.
Assume a standard 2-axes scatter plot, with a randomly placed horizontal line that represents chance/luck. The scattered points represent opportunities.
Any opportunity that occurs above the luck line is successful, anything below it is unsuccessful.
Above a given threshold of luck, maximizing opportunities is a good strategy because there's a high likelihood they'll pay off.
But if your luck is too low, then maximizing opportunities will still result in a larger number of successes, but at a much greater cost. A more efficient strategy might be to invest more resources in the successes you actually get.
I'm not picking a side here, just trying to bridge a potential disconnect in the discussion. Podgajski, please correct me if I've misrepresented your position
Maybe this can simplify it even more. You have no agency deciding whether a coin lands on heads or tails. We would say someone is lucky if they said a coin will land on heads more than tails and they were right.
If Someone can explain to me how you can change your agency without physically manipulating the coin then have it. And these random things happen every day in our lives.
And I’m not even saying don’t try for success, I’m just saying, don’t listen to these people who talk about success like it’s something that you can achieve without being on your side.
The truth is you don’t have 100% agency in your life and you never will. It’s impossible. So since you don’t have 100% agency, the rest is up to luck. Good or bad luck whatever it is I’m not being negative here.
But if luck is a quantity that fluctuate and is positively biased, (a reasonable a priori seeing that most people succeed at something) or that it's range is ]0,1[ , you are wrong and willful exposure to opportunities increase your total amount of wins.
Also even if luck is a stable quantity, it's helped by attempts at success.
Other words, the odds don’t care about your luck.
If I go to a job interview and at the end of it, the person says “ok, I’m gonna flip this coin — guess the outcome and you get the job”. I guess — I miss.
Then they say “want to guess again?”
Repeat until I get the job.
Probability has an effect on outcomes, but only insofar as the chances you’re willing to take. Luck is just an observation of a single outcome.
You’re artificially predicting a positive outcome. You said “repeat until I get the job“. But you could be very unlucky person and keep sitting there flipping and flipping the coin and never guessing right. I’m not saying to not keep trying. I’m saying your certainty of positive outcome is false.
Increasing the surface area of luck is about fostering opportunities to flip a coin
Just simple stuff like showing up to work every day. Going to social events. Networking. Taking classes. These will increase the opportunities you have to flip the coin.
Thinking there’s a fixed number of flips in life is false and really a poor way of thinking.
That’s my point. That’s my only point. The outcome is still always every time going to depend on luck. Because you can flip that coin 100 times and it could land on heads every time when you wanted tails. Is it unlikely? Yes, is it impossible? No.
Focus on what you can control. People who flip more times are more likely to have heads. So be that person.
It’s obvious to focus on the things you can control, which is why I don’t focus on luck. And that’s also why I have sympathy for people who fail.