“The amount of good luck coming your way depends on your willingness to act.” – Barbara Sher

Luck has nothing to do with chance. Luck has everything to do with chances.

Getting lucky is a skill. The people we consider lucky are simply better at it than others. They get lucky for a reason - and it’s not the rabbit’s foot in their pocket.

What is luck, really?

Luck is not winning the lottery or finding a pot of gold. This is chance, not luck.

Getting lucky is about seizing opportunity. The luckiest people have more opportunities and consistently seize them.

To visualize luck in action, picture yourself as a target in a wide-open field. On the other side of the field stands an archer, firing arrows toward you. Each of these arrows is one of life's opportunities. Each arrow that hits your target is an opportunity seized.

Trying to land one of these opportunities, you set up in the middle of the field, patiently waiting for one to fall.

But the field you're on has only one archer, and they have horrendous aim. On top of that, you're a small target, sitting hundreds of yards away. For all you know, it could be months before an arrow falls anywhere close, let alone hits you.

This may be how you think about luck - which is why you never get lucky. You see luck as a game of chance, a game over which you have little control.

Lucky people have a different outlook. They see luck as a game of skill, a game over which they have all the control.

First, lucky people don't set themselves up in an open field with one novice archer. They search for the field with hundreds of expert archers and set themselves up there. This way, arrows are whizzing all around them. This gives them more opportunities.

Second, lucky people don’t settle for being a small target. The best archers in the world will still struggle to hit a target if it’s too small. So lucky people spend their time becoming a bigger target. This helps them seize more opportunities.

Both steps are important. The biggest target in the world will never get hit by a novice archer. And even hundreds of expert archers will struggle to hit a super small target.

To get lucky, you need to have more opportunities and make it easier to seize them.

Mental models for getting lucky

“Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality.” – Eliyahu Goldratt

Since getting lucky is a skill, you can get better at it. Guided by the following mental models, you can make decisions and take actions to put you on the path to getting lucky.

George's Razor

When making a decision, choose the path that leads to more luck. Make the decision that involves talking to more people, exploring a new area, or learning new skills.

For example, say it’s Saturday night and you have plans to meet up with two new people. It’s 7:30, pouring rain, and you’re hoping they’re the ones to cancel. But the alternative is six episodes of something on Netflix. Which do you choose?

George’s Razor says you grab your umbrella and head out. It might not be this one, but eventually one of these decisions will lead to new opportunities.

To get lucky, consistently make the luckier choice.

Leverage

Time, energy, and attention are scarce resources. To get more out of them, you need to leverage them.

Compared to regular activities, high leverage activities lead to more opportunities for the same amount of input. The more time, energy, and attention you spend on these activities, the more opportunities you will have.

For example, consider how you spend two hours on a Sunday afternoon. You could spend those two hours on a Zoom meeting with someone new. This would lead to meeting one new person every week, slowly but steadily increasing your opportunities.

Or, you could spend two hours writing a weekly newsletter, conversing with hundreds of people in the same amount of time. This leads to meeting hundreds of people every week. And you’ll probably meet their friends too, and their friend’s friends.

To get lucky, leverage your time, energy, and attention.

Fat Tails

There are two ways to model the world - normal distributions (bell curves) and power law distributions (80/20 curves). Nassim Taleb has made a career about explaining the differences, so I'll leave the technical details to him.

The simplest example is weight versus wealth. If you took every person in New York City and sorted them by their weight, it would look like a bell curve. Most people would fall in the middle, with a few very heavy people and very light people on the edges. At most, the heaviest person would be 10 times the weight of the lightest person.

But if you sorted every person by wealth, it would look like an 80/20 curve. Almost everyone would fall on the far left of the distribution. But the wealthiest person would be way out on the right edge. In this distribution, the wealthiest person isn't 10 times as wealthy as the poorest person, they are 10 million times as wealthy. The wealth distribution has fat tails.

Lucky people focus on these fat tails. They understand that the best opportunities aren't worth 10 times more than the average, but 10 million times more. So they do everything possible to expose themselves to them.

To get lucky, focus on the fat tails.

Serendipity Vehicles

For opportunities to find you, you need to be easy to find. Being easy to find leads to serendipity - those encounters and opportunities that happen purely due to chance.

To be easy to find, you need a serendipity vehicle - something you create that makes it easy for others to find you. Your serendipity vehicle should be something you produce regularly that shows other people what you're interested in. This makes it easy for people to see that you view the world the same way they do.

The easiest way is to start by sharing the work you're already doing. The two best ways to do this are to start a weekly newsletter and tweet about what you're working on. You'll be surprised how many like-minded individuals will find you when you start sharing this way.

To get lucky, start a serendipity vehicle.

The role of luck

Few people are willing to credit the role of luck in their life. Acknowledging how lucky they've been would cut against the story they tell themselves about their success. It was their 90-hour weeks, relentless focus, and pure determination that brought about their success, not luck.

But this is the wrong way to think about it.

Instead, your goal should be for everyone to think you got lucky, knowing in fact you did. But only because you had more opportunities, and did a better job seizing them.

Now get going

It has never been easier to get lucky. The internet has unlocked opportunities on an unimaginable scale. Better yet, you can quickly set yourself to ensure those opportunities find you.

To seize them, make the lucky choice, seek leverage, focus on the fat tails, and start a serendipity vehicle.

Best of luck.

Thank you to the Compound Writing members who reviewed this post: Ross Gordon, Nick Drage, Tyler Wince, Dan Hunt, Dru Riley, and Tom White

To learn more about George's Razor, listen to this episoe of Modern Wisdom.

For more on fat tails, read Taylor Pearson on How to Get Lucky.

For more on serendipity vehicles, read David Perell on How to Maximize Serendipity