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How to Create Luck

swyx on August 29, 2020

My entire worldview changed when I realized that luck can be created. More precisely, you can actively create optimal conditions for lucky things...
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Will Johnson

In the “Richest Man in Babylon” it says “Men action are favored by the Goddess of Luck”

So I agree you can create your own luck by taking action and doing things that just seem to draw luck to you.

We often here stories like “She was shopping in the Mall a producer saw her and asked her to be in a movie, now she’s famous”. It’s makes people think that those are the only luck there is.

I’ve had more lucky things happen to me once I put in effort for the goals I wanted

Great post Swyx

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swyx profile image
swyx

thank you for the kind words as always :) :)

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Hussein Duvigneau

I once saw a televised social experiment, where strangers were asked "do you generally consider yourself lucky?"

They were then given a book, and asked to go through and count every picture. On one of the first few pages was a picture with text that read something like "STOP COUNTING, THERE ARE 81 PICTURES IN THIS BOOK!"

The people who initially answered "yes" to if they consider themselves lucky tended to notice the image, while those who said "no" skipped straight past it and counted their way through every page.

The conclusion was that you make your own luck through power of observation and seeking opportunities, rather than being too focused in your own world.

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swyx profile image
swyx

luck is all around us if we notice it harder :)

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Shad Mirza

Someone told me once, "Luck is being in the right place at the right time". I was particularly lucky in my career and when I retrospected in this context, I found that I was trying and failing at a lot of stuff in a very short amount of time. Being in a lot of places makes the probability of being in the right place at the right time much higher. Maybe that's why I got lucky.

Awesome write-up btw, thanks for sharing.

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swyx profile image
swyx

type 2 luck! try being more intentional with what you try :)

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Rafael Nunes

Great post! Thanks, swyx. When I think about feeling unlucky, besides privilege, I think about the lack of acknowledgement of your "luck" and the absence of "wins". The first is complicated because when something "lucky" happens to you, you do not perceive that as an output of your initiatives therefore you do not see how you could get more of it. It's hard, but maybe if we were to reason about ours lucky moments we would identify things that worked and things that could be reproducible.

The absence of "wins" is when you do not feel like anything "lucky" happens to you, and there are a lot of things that play and need to be unpacked here. You may not recognise anymore a win because you are in that mindset of unlucky. It may be as well that you are not getting any "lucky" for a long time. These are really bad because they are exhausting, they affect your willpower, and your ability to persevere.

I'm thinking that managing expectations play a big role in continuously creating luck.

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Mike Bybee • Edited

I only sincerely wish people good "luck" (in quotes), because you create it for yourself. If I wish good luck without the quotes, it's a "good luck with that" connotation.

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swyx profile image
swyx • Edited

Excalidraw for those who want to modify: excalidraw.com/#json=4885209526829...

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fatmonky profile image
fatmonky

Great post! I wonder, what is your thinking of how Nassim Taleb's Antifragile fits in your framework?

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swyx profile image
swyx • Edited

it doesn't - antifragility is useful but isn't really relevant to reflexivity unless you really try to shoehorn it

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fatmonky

I have been mulling on this for a while, and I am not sure I agree that there is no relevance.
Taleb wrote of the four quadrants before (edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicho...), with antifragility &black swans belonging to the fourth quadrant (complex payoffs, extremistan distribution). What he's talking about is the domain, the playing field, the market, etc.
Whereas what you wrote above is about the actor's choices of actions.

The two are interlinked when an actor acts. If an actor chooses a domain that has simple payoffs and mediocristan-distribution, then even if the actor chooses good habits and strategies, there's a limited upside due to the domain choice.

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fatmonky • Edited

the four quadrants here (realised his post is pretty long and this was buried)