How to Get Lucky(ier)
capturing luck is a skill and as with any skill you can improve
“They just got lucky”
Yes.
They did.
So too can you.
There’s a formula for it.
The real life Felix Felicis, not as a fictional potion from Harry Potter, but as something you can write down on a sheet of paper.
Luck is real. It is also quite uneven and unfair. Some people are born into better families, better cities, better networks, better eras, and better initial conditions. Some of that is completely out of your control. But not all of it.
Two people can walk into the same room, meet the same person, live through the same technology wave, or stumble across the same idea. One of those people walks right on by their lucky break. The other manages to turn their luck into a relationship, a career, or a new company. The difference is not whether luck was present. It was there for both people. The difference is whether they were able to capture it.Capturing luck is a skill, and like any skill, it can be improved.
In fact, I even have a formula for it.
Luck Captured = c * Luck Surface Area * Agency
# Lucky Collisions = c * Luck Surface Area
Luck Captured = # Lucky Collisions * Agency
That is the whole essay in 3 lines. In plain English, your luck captured is a function of how many lucky collisions you have, multiplied by your ability to act when one of those collisions happens — your agency.
Your number of lucky collisions can be defined as some constant times your luck surface area. I haven’t assigned a concept to this constant yet, but I can explain the rest of it.
# Lucky Collisions = c * Luck Surface Area
Luck Surface Area = Reach * (Right Time + Right Place + Right People + Right Idea + ...)
Your luck surface area can be expressed as the sum of everything that has gone right to make your lucky collision occur multiplied by your reach. Your reach is everything you’ve put into the world (including yourself) that lets someone find out about you, which is a proxy for the number of ways that luck can find you. The more you’ve shipped, the more surfaces luck can hit, with those surfaces ultimately funneling back to you.
The other four terms above in the summation are the primary terms that help to generate lucky encounters, but there are many other.
The last part of the formula is agency. Here’s the seminal blog on being high agency: highagency.com. This is the formula it describes:
Agency = Clear Thinking * Bias to Action * Disagreeability
I, personally, like to reduce things to just:
Agency = Courage * Preparedness
Put together:
Luck Captured = c * Agency * Luck Surface Area
Luck Captured =
c * (Courage * Preparedness)
*
Reach * (Right Time + Right Place + Right People + Right Idea + ...)
And there it is. My expanded master formula for getting lucky. But to truly get lucky, you can’t just encounter luck, you have to capture it. Like a Pokemon.
Luck Encountered vs Luck Captured
Most people talk about luck as if it is binary.
You either got lucky or you did not.
But that misses an important distinction. It is better to think of it as luck encountered vs luck captured.
Luck encountered is what crosses your luck surface area. Luck captured is what you manage to turn into something useful. Even someone who draws the winning lottery ticket still has to call in and claim their winnings -- without that one action their luck was never captured.
For the startup people, you can meet the right investor and not be prepared to pitch your startup or make your ask -- netting you out nothing. The examples write themselves of times you can encounter luck, but capture none of it.
Your ability to then scale the luck encountered from your luck surface area into some amount of luck captured is proportional to your agency.
So let’s see what makes this all tick, starting with your luck surface area.
Luck Surface Area
Luck surface area determines how often your life comes into contact with luck. The larger your surface area, the more often luck can hit you, like the photons hitting a solar panel.
Your luck surface area is composed of your reach (encompassed by you and your work) times what I call “The Sum of Rights.”
Luck Surface Area = Reach * (Right Time + Right Place + Right People + Right Idea + ...)
There’s a high degree of interdependence between these terms in that if you are in the right place, you are more likely to meet the right people, etc., etc., but this simple formulation is good enough for me.
We’ll explore each of the rights and why they’re essential to generating your luck.
Right Time
The conditions for the right time are probably the hardest to directly influence as an individual. It is like trying to time the market. You usually cannot know the exact bottom or top. However, you can notice when things are changing and position yourself accordingly. The ones who look lucky in hindsight are often the people who were standing near the wave before everyone agreed it was a wave.
They were building mobile apps before everyone had an iPhone.
They were making YouTube videos before “creator” sounded like a job.
They were researching transformers before Generative AI took the world by storm.
And, when it became the right time for their craft or skill to start garnering attention, they had years of experience under their belt and were ready to capitalize. So, while you generally cannot control the right time as much as you can other factors, think about the things you are spending your time on and if there is a wave behind them. The wave brings with it incredible opportunities and incredible luck.
Right Place
A wise man, Uncle Shaan, once said “proximity is power.” There’s an underlying logic to why actors move to LA, finance bros to New York, and tech bros to SF.
Where you are changes what you see, who you meet, and the opportunities you get access to. It is one of the biggest determinants to the number of lucky collisions you will have in your life.
So if you want startup luck, you want to move to somewhere with a reputation for startups. If you want creative luck, you want to be somewhere heralded for its creativity. If you want intellectual luck, be near universities or research institutions.
The place does not necessarily have to be physical (although I would bias towards it). It can be a corner of the internet. Regardless, spend time thinking about and seeking the right place for you and the things you want to do. Because “proximity is power”.
Right People
The right people are fundamentally the most important part of your luck surface area.
People carry all the luck they’ve captured.
And parts of their luck can become your luck.
The majority of life-changing opportunities arrive in one way or another through people. Through their information, an introduction to someone in their network, their trust, or any number of peopley ways.
And the right people do not just give you opportunities -- they can actually change what kind of person you become before the opportunity arrives. It’s quite similar to how people say you become the average of your 5 closest friends. This feature is what makes people the most important term in your luck surface area. It’s because the right people increase or decrease your agency, which scales the effect you have on anything you do, even capturing luck! To a lesser degree, places and times can also scale your agency, but it’s ultimately because of the people in those places and at those times.
People are not only biggest conduits of luck, but also your biggest conduits of agency.
Right Idea
Having the right idea means you are directionally correct in your thinking.
The wrong idea can waste a lot of agency. You can work hard in the wrong direction. You can be brave about something nobody wants. You can be early to something that never arrives.
So having the right idea is important and partially requires you to have solid thinking and some taste, which is kind of like an ability to feel when a thought has potential in it.
To have the right idea does not require immovable certainty in a specific idea. It means the direction is alive enough to deserve action. From there, you can iterate away.
Agency
Agency determines how much you can do with the collisions that come about from your luck surface area.
I think agency itself can be factored into two terms:
Agency = Courage * Preparedness
I like the multiplication here because either term can collapse the whole thing.
Courage with zero preparation is just foolhardy recklessness. It’s a completely unfounded bias to action with no thinking behind it.
Preparedness without the courage to act is unused potential.
You need both to make things happen.
Courage
Courage is your willingness to turn your thoughts into an action, even in the face of opposition. I think it effectively captures Bias to Action * Disagreeableness in one word. As an aside, that’s disagreeableness as in being willing to push past the resistance of the world / others against your actions, not as in being rude.
If you never take the swing, your luck is never captured. Courage is what keeps you stepping up to the plate and swinging.
Preparedness
I’d describe preparedness as the sum of what you know and how you are at the moment of a collision — knowledge plus your current state of being. I bring up your current state of being because it’s critical to how you react to the lucky collision. If you are tired out of your mind, you are unlikely to make the most out of the luck you’ve been presented with, if you even notice it at all before it expires.
The sum of your knowledge plus your current state of being will also largely determine how clear your thinking is during those lucky moments.
“In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” or more commonly nowadays “luck favors the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur (aka the milk man)
Time to Go Get Lucky
If you want to get luckier there’s two identifiable levers to pull on.
Increase your luck surface area.
Increase your agency.
And you will get luckier.
You will likely never be able to force luck to manifest whenever you want, but you can live in a way that makes luck more and more likely to find you. And you can become the kind of person who does something with it when it does.
And that, my friends, is how to get lucky (not like that, but also like that 😉).