7 Ways to Get Lucky (no, not like that...)

“History is littered with people who positioned themselves to win and then just took advantage of the storm’ - Shane Parrish

Let me disavow you of a comfortable notion - ‘luck’ isn’t some cosmic woo fairy dust that gets sprinkled upon some and not others by an occasionally benevolent universe.

Luck is the result of a thousand tiny decisions, repeated actions, disciplined practices that lead to ‘suddenly’ being in the right place at the right time.

Given that knowledge we can assume that luck has a surface area - that the ability to position yourself to take full advantage of any opportunity, without needing to know what the opportunity might be - is something that you can have both a direct and indirect influence on.

It’s time to get lucky.

Here’s 7 ways to increase the surface area of your luck.

1. Stay in the game.

You can’t kick a goal from the bench, or the stands. You need to be on the field. And the greater amount of game time you can accumulate the greater your chance of getting your mitts on the ball and heading down field.

You can’t play if you’re injured, sick, exhausted, or just patently unskilled.

So keep those boxes unchecked - it’s relatively simple.

Eat your rainbow (if your plate is all the same colour you have a nutritional problem).

See the sun and touch grass, get your sleep, lay off the stuff you know you shouldn’t be hopping into.

Hone your craft - in the light, in the dark, when no one is watching. Spend the requisite hours beating away at the skills you need to get where you want to go. No one will do this for you, you aren’t going to hack your way to a long and healthy career. You might skip a rung or two but in the end, those with deep and innate skills will always accelerate past you.

Understand where you are in your journey. If you’re an amatuer your job is make less unforced errors, don’t take yourself out by trying to bet the farm on every play. When you have progressed and the skills are there, then your focus is less on error and more on delivering straight up winners.

2. Endure Difficulty.

This is an extension of point 1. People quit, all the time, because hard times and difficulty and setback are an experience that has been denied them - until now. And when it arrivers they don’t have a roadmap to navigate by, they don’t have a mental and emotional ‘cookie jar’ to dip into.

The Cookie Jar concept comes from the hardest of hard himself David Goggins - when it gets tough he dips into the mental cookie jar where he keeps the list and memories of all the tough and hard things he has done and/or endured. To remind himself that he can indeed endure.

Too often we are quick to write off our ability to endure - you are far harder and more robust than you give yourself credit for.

So do hard things, put yourself in some healthy hardship from time to time. You don’t have to sign up for Hell Week and become a Navy Seal - but maybe tackle that marathon, maybe skip a meal from time to time, walk don’t drive, be one of those people who only use the stairs. (hoprrifying fact - given the option of elevator/travelator or stairs, only 2% of people choose the stairs - don’t beleive me, next time you are moving through an airport look for yourself, people who have just spent hours stuck in a seat will still choose to not move themselves 98% of the time)

Now, when the inevitable hard plays come, you simply play on, because you know that you can endure hard things. This is how you stay in the game.

3. Zoom Out

We are mired in short termism, from news cycles, political cycles, market cycles. It still concerns me greatly that most of the advice posts for social media are all about how your first few seconds must be epic - becuase that’s all you get. We are devolving to have the attention span of a gnat.

When you look to play the long game, when you zoom out, the bumps in the road begin to smooth out, both the peaks and valleys have a little more perspective around them. You being to see the journey, the value of the time spent on the field, the volume under the curve, and can take pride and comfort in the body of work that you are accumulating.

If you ride the rollercoaster of the ‘tyranny of now’ then you’re in for a short and rough ride my friend.

Not only does a zoomed out perspective help you ameliorate the dips, it helps you keep the ego in check on the upswings as well.

It’s never as bad or as good as you think.

4. Curiosity.

To quote Ted Lasso quoting Walt Whitman - ‘be curious, not judgemental’

(for bonus trivia points, Walt never said that, it’s often misattributed to him - even Hollywood screenwriters get it wrong sometimes).

And whilst it sounds like a throwaway tagline, ‘be curious’ there is a serious and darker undertone.

The power of curiosity, of being in charge of your own learning and focus, is being actively eroded away. Think of how much of your ‘enquiry’ these days are driven by algorithms. Instagram reels, Tiktok, YouTube - the vast majority of the time we simply flick and scroll through what an algo thinks we want to see, not what we have determined we are looking for. YouTube is the largest TV channel in history, we watch an unspeakable number of hours of content every day and seem entirely oblivious to the fact that someone else, who isn’t even human, is driving the remote.

If you can retain your curiosity and more importantly, the sovereignty of that curiosity, then you are are being the move ahead of the curve and the masses.

5. The Social Network

No not that one - the real one.

Have a network of IRL friends, people whom you see in the real world and spend time with, talk with, laugh with, break bread with.

Not just because it is good for your health in every aspect - but because it spreads your contacts, opens you up to conversations, opportunities, advice, guidance, knowledge, that otherwise would have remained out of reach.

But harsh as it may seem, curate your friends from time to time. As you progress and develop, some friends will enter and some will leave - and that’s ok. Do it with grace and humility but understand that your journey may not be celebrated or even understood by everyone. And that’s ok.

Don’t be an arse - remember that when you were a beginner, an amatuer, a shapeless mass of ambition and tomfoolery, there were people who loved and backed you. Don’t be in a rush to claim a new shiny cohort just so you can belong.

This is a tricky needle to thread at times, but if you are in it for the long game, keep in mind that people from your past can turn up in the darndest of places in your future.

6. Bias for Momentum.

At some point you have to step on the field and see what happens. You can have all the plans and strategies and charts and concepts in the world but until you actually test them they are nothing more than nive ideas.

Being someone who has momentum, who in the simplest terms - does things - gives you a constant river of feedback about what the real world is rewarding, and what it is not.

Taking action beings expectation and reality into violent collision and your beautiful option tree gets pruned with savage efficiency. Which means you know what works and what doesn’t, what avenues to pursue and which to close off entirely. Now you’re allocating resources in a far more targeted and cognisant fashion.

Can we do that? I don’t know…so how do we find out?

We go and do.

7. Position, Position, Position.

“What looks like talent often is good positioning,. A good position allows you to think clearly rather than being forced by circumstance into a decision.” - The Knowledge Project

‘I didn’t have a choice’ - heard that one before? And it’s usually followed by someone giving you the trite reply of, ‘you always have a choice’

And that might be true, but it doesn’t mean that choices available were the ones you wanted. Time, tide and tempest will always arrive to demand a decision, some choices will be removed, some made more costly and other less desirable options left for the picking.

Unless you positioned yourself before the storm came.

And much of position echoes staying in the game - being robust and in good health gives you a head start.

Next is what do you have to fall back on - what level of redundancy did you build whilst the sun was shining and the graphs were all heading up and to the right.

Did you stack some funds away for the proverbial rainy day? Did you invest in skills and capacity, even when you could’ve have sailed on and just leveraged the ‘good times’ as if they would last forever?

Did you manage risk, energy, resources, knowledge, connections and alliances.

Or did you let the good times roll?

The greatest returns come to those who positioned themselves well when there seemed no imperative to do so.

TL:DR

Serendipity has a surface area, here’s how to increase yours;

1. Stay in the game
2. Endure Difficulty
3. Zoom out
4. Be Curious
5. The Social Network
6. Bias for Momentum
7. Position, Position, Position.

You don’t have to chase leprechauns or wear your lucky charms to find the end of the rainbow.

See you on the field :)