We make our fortunes, and we call them fate

Is everything in life based on luck? Yes. Only if you build your character such that luck finds you. Many people think being successful is all about luck. No. It isn’t. It is about becoming the kind of person that becomes successful.

In his book — Chase, Chance and Creativity, Dr. James Austin outlines his theory of the four kinds of luck, which he prefers calling chance. As he explains in the book:

The [four] varieties of chance also involve distinctive personality traits and differ in the way one particular individual influences them.

And, so the four kinds of luck are:

1. Blind Luck or Dumb Luck
2. Active Luck or Luck from hustling
3. Planned luck or Luck from preparation
4. Unique luck, i.e., Luck from your unique character

Blind luck or Dumb luck

What we all most commonly refers to as luck, i.e., where you get lucky just because something completely out of your own control happens. Basically, fortune or fate. This is like finding a $100 bill while crossing the street.

Dr. Austin explains in his book:

..the good luck that occurs is completely accidental. It is pure blind luck that comes with no effort on our part.

If you listen to How I Built This by Guy Raz, Guy asks this question to his celebrity entrepreneur guests towards the end of the talk — ‘How much of your success is luck, and how much of it is due to your hard-work’. When Guy asked this to Michael Dell, the Founder of Dell Inc., Mr. Dell said -

“I feel like I was really lucky to be born in the United States. … because, I think in United States when you are 20 years old and you show up and you wanna sell something to somebody they don’t look at you too funny. So, I think that was my biggest stroke of luck — to be born in the United States.”

That’s kind of articulation of blind luck.

Active luck or Luck from hustling

This luck comes through hard-work, persistence, hustle.

It’s getting something out of chaos, the chaos of continuously trying one thing or the other. So, the more you work, stir things around and get things in motion, the more opportunities you generate to land up with a breakthrough.

Naval Ravikant, founder of the Angellist, suggests this about luck from hustling on his podcast — How to get rich (without getting lucky):

“Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot of things, lots of things will get stirred up in the dust.”

Planned luck or Luck from preparation

This is when you become very good at spotting luck, i.e., opportunities, trends etc. As Dr. Austin explains in his book —

Chance presents only a faint clue, the potential opportunity exists, but it will be overlooked except by that one person uniquely equipped to observe it, visualize it conceptually, and fully grasp its significance. .. involves a special receptivity, discernment, and intuitive grasp of significance unique to one particular recipient.

When consumers started getting comfortable with putting their credit-card details on a website and transacting online, some entrepreneurs spotted the window of opportunity and created eCommerce.

With eCommerce, some others spotted opportunities and created massive logistics companies catering to these new way of shopping.

Basically, experience will help you spotting those lucky breakthroughs and with more and more experience you can actually direct your energy to even creating those.

The other way of looking at it is, if you are very skilled and interested in a certain area, you will be more attuned to spotting those opportunities where these lucky breaks are happening. So, knowledge, work and skill makes you more sensitive to this type of luck.

Dr. Austin explains through an example, the example of Sir Alexander Fleming discovering Penicillin by chance —

He was at his work bench in the laboratory, made an observation, and his mental sequences then went something like this: (a) I see that a mold has fallen by accident into my culture dish; (2) the staphylococcal colonies residing near it failed to grow; (3) therefore, the mold must have secreted something that killed the bacteria; (4) this reminds me of a similar experience I had once before; (5) maybe this new “something” from the mold could be used to kill staphylococci that cause human infections.

Unique luck, i.e., luck from your unique character

When you build unique skillset and character, and thus reputation or a unique brand, you draw the luck towards you. This is the hardest kind, and needs a lot of work. This is where you create your own luck.

Dr. Austin goes on to explain this as —

..comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave. .. favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

Naval Ravikant, in his podcast gives a good example to explain Unique Luck. He says, let’s say you are very skilled as deep seat diving. And, someone through sheer blind luck discovered a chest of treasure buried deep under the sea. But, they come to you to help them extract the same, and spilt that 50:50. This is absolute creation of luck.

A few other quotes to substantiate the argument for the Unique Luck:

“extreme people get extreme results.” — Sam Altman

“you can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns.” — Jeffrey Pfeffer

So, basically this translates to — Build your character in a way so luck becomes deterministic.

Summarising

Marc Andreessen summarises this beautifully in one of his blogs through questions that you should be asking yourselves —

1. How energetic are you?
2. How curious are you?
3. How flexible and aggressive are you at synthesising?
4. How uniquely are you developing a personal point of view — a personal approach?

So, being lucky is all about building your character in a way so luck becomes deterministic. And, that on the other hand is all about how we live our lives as creators in any field.

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