How to Embrace Chance and Create Your Own Luck.
There is a tendency to attribute things to luck. This can either be positive or negative. It could have been a stroke of luck that meant that you found yourself in a specific relationship. It could also be luck that someone got the job that you wanted. People dictate the narrative that they tell themselves when it comes to luck.
But, there is a science behind luck, a way to maximize it. It is about how you seize the lucky moments or serendipitous encounters.
How do we define luck?
The noun ‘luck’ can be defined as ‘success or good things that happen to you, that do not come from your own abilities or efforts’. On the flip side, bad luck is the ‘lack of success or bad things that happen to you, that have not been caused by yourself or other people’.
Good luck or bad luck, there is a lack of accountability. It originates from chance. We brush aside the chain of accidents that seemingly contribute to our own ‘lucky’ or ‘unlucky’ circumstances. By pure definition, we do not allocate enough value or attention to luck.
We can demean luck. We look down on it sometimes. As Nat Eliason says ‘we typically use it to explain away someone’s success or status, as a way to make us feel better for not hitting that same level, or to justify inaction’. This is a lazy way to abdicate responsibility. And the reason why it is easy to brush off someone else’s success as luck is because we don’t understand it. There is an art to it. To getting the opportunities that exhibit luck. To being in the right place at the right time.
It’s self-preserving.
‘The acknowledgment of inability to predict and control events that can have deleterious personal consequences is highly unsettling. To gain some tranquility in a chaotic world, people turn a deaf ear to fortuity in misfortune’.
There is an element of self-preservation by simply ignoring our involvement in chance events. This is more so when the outcome is deemed to be negative. Psychologist Bandura (1998) summarizes this eloquently in his dissection of fortuitous circumstance i.e. luck. It is scary to think that the randomness of events that occur could potentially propel us into misfortune.
However, neglecting this happenchance altogether is the real misfortune. It means missing out on the opportunities to maximize upon our own random chain of events.
Yes, there are specific events that are a result of cause and effect. But that is only when looking at them in isolation. When a series of such events intersect, we have our luck, our serendipity.
The secret to maximizing our luck is not only in taking advantage of the intersections but increasing the likelihood of them happening.
How to carve out your own luck.
‘Personal proclivities, the social circles in which one moves, and the kinds of people who populate those settings make some types of intersects more probable than others’.
The scope of chance encounters is huge. Most of these happen and we don’t notice them. Most of them have little impact if anything on our lives. Therefore, it is not about being able to predict when they will happen, but about maximizing them when they do.
This is mostly down to personality. Being the kind of person who seeks out randomness. David Perell is also a proponent of this idea. Serendipity is a state of mind. Enter a perpetual state of opening doors for others, networking randomly and surround yourself with a diversity of people and develop a variety of skills.
It is not enough to master your craft and accept that is that. If you want to enhance your serendipity, you have to work with the randomness that is all around you. Every interaction you have in your day can be opportune. It is about whether your eyes are open to this or not. Perell advises building conversational momentum through asking questions, staying engaged, and talking about the other person’s interests.
Remember the most interesting people are those who are the most interested.
It takes discipline to cultivate this kind of attention to everyday randomness. But doing so is a surefire way to accelerate progress of any kind.
Jason Roberts’ essay on increasing your luck surface area takes this to the next level.
Luck= Doing x Telling
This is the formula for your luck creation. Roberts’ model proposes that the amount of serendipity is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you are passionate about, combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.
See it like this. Every day you encounter people, be it at the gym, Starbucks, work, on the train, etc. The list is endless. Talk to people. Be interested. Show your interest. Speak about your passions.
And then ‘when you do something you’re excited about, you will naturally pull others into your orbit’.
“I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it”
― Thomas Jefferson
What can you do?
Be persistent. Be inquisitive. Be venturesome. Chance will favor you. Do not fear the randomness of events out of self-preservation.
Have the humility to acknowledge that you do not have control over fortuitous events. But, be empowered to realize that you have control over the impact you exert.
So, if anything, be prepared. Cultivate the mindset of increasing your opportunities for luck and serendipity. And when they come, grab it with both hands. Because it will disappear as quickly as it happened.
