How to Create Luck

Authors

Shawn Wang

Tags

Top Highlights

• All sources call it “individualized action” but I’ve renamed it “magnetic luck” t

• Jason Roberts coined the term ”Luck Surface Area”, and it was expanded by Sean Murphy and popularized by Patrick McKenzie.

• Jason has a really simple model of how to grow your LSA - do more things, and tell more people about it. Doing and Telling.

• Hope luck finds you.

• 🌱 Accidental Luck: You have the same luck as a plant.

• 🏃🏽‍♀️ Active Luck: The luck you get from constantly moving around.

• 💊 Prepared Luck: The luck you get from noticing that something lucky has happened, that most would miss.

• “Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”” - Gian-Carlo Rota

• More precisely, you can actively create optimal conditions for lucky things to happen to you.

• Most people have a binary view of luck:

• “You don’t get extreme results without extreme actions.” - Derek Sivers

• “I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.” - Charles Kettering

• “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” - Seneca

• “Chance favors the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur

• Exploring (and to a lesser extent Grinding and Copywork) are Actively Habitual, non Strategic activities.

• The closing question of every episode of Guy Raz’s How I Built This podcast asks successful people: “How much of your success is due to skill, and how much is due to luck?” Those who believe in their own agency answer the former. Others - who’ve seen people smarter and harder working than them fail - answer the latter.

• The second axis is the insight - that there are forms of luck that apply to everyone, and there are forms of luck that are available only to someone in your unique position. There is a you-shaped hole in the universe and you can either passively occupy it or you can become a beacon for some idea or purpose.

• Jason Roberts coined the term ”Luck Surface Area”, and it was expanded by Sean Murphy and popularized by Patrick McKenzie.

• I liken this model of luckiness to a “catchment area” (a term from urban and hydrological geography). Luck is still randomly occurring, but you can position yourself in a way that captures more of it:

• 2021 update: a reader visualized the LSA concept with this fancy video!

Toughts & Comments

fei yuan

so cool