Weekly Nugget of Wisdom #17

Increasing the surface area of your luck

Welcome to another Nugget of Wisdom! A free weekly post I send out every Thursday. These are designed to be short and sweet, a quick read to (hopefully) impart some sort of wisdom, or at the very least to get you thinking about something interesting.

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Increasing the surface area of your luck

I’ve found that luck is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the world. At first glance it’s such a simple thing: you either get lucky, or you don’t. You can have good luck or bad luck. You’re a lucky person or you’re an unlucky person. Most people feel that luck is out of your control. You roll the dice, place your bets, and then let the gods of fate decide what happens.

And that’s obviously true to an extent. You can’t control what happens once something leaves your control (or was never in your control to begin with). You can’t know whether a token price will go up or down, whether a lottery ticket will win, whether a sports team will cover the spread, whether the fed will lower rates in 3 months, and so on. You can make educated guesses — but you can never know. But that doesn’t mean you can’t influence your luck at all.

One of my favourite articles of all time is How To Get Lucky by Sahil Bloom. In it he talks about the concept of your luck surface area, and how by taking certain actions, you can almost always become a “luckier” person.

The term was actually coined by Jason Roberts though, and the idea is simple:

The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated

In other words: more exposure and more signal = more chances for serendipity to find you.

Or as my favourite philosopher pal namesake says:

If you sit at home in your room all day, watching netflix, playing video games, and eating junk — you’re probably not gonna get lucky very often (pun slightly intended).

On the other hand, if you’re spending your time learning new skills, expanding your network, talking to others, exercising, getting out of the house, thinking about ways to make money, to grow, to improve, and putting yourself out there… sure there’s no guarantee of any luck, but boy golly, the chances someone is randomly going to offer you a job, ask you out on a date, or invite you to a valuable group chat is a hell of a lot higher than if you were that other person!

To put a crypto spin on it: if you spend your time trying new protocols, learning about the technology, discussing it with others on the timeline, using testnets, spending real money, and so on… you might get lucky with an airdrop! Maybe some totally unexpected, random, out-of-the-blue thing too that nobody was farming.

And people will go: “oh man, look how lucky those people are! I wish I got lucky like that sometimes!”, and then they’ll go back playing their video games and complaining a bit more about life.

If you want to be luckier, try putting yourself in more situations where luck can find you. It’s not gonna find you sitting at home, isolated, keeping to yourself, doing the exact same stuff you’ve been doing for years. Put yourself out there, work hard, stay curious and open minded, and you’ll be amazed at how often the gods of fate smile fondly upon you.

It really is actually astonishing how many ridiculously hardworking, passionate, dedicated, disciplined, and driven people all end up being lucky too!

NB: I know that there are whole swaths of luck that I didn’t cover today, including the luck that is literally 100% out of any of our individual control, such as the luck of being born in a certain country, being born to loving or abusive parents, the luck of being born with all your limbs, your faculties. The luck of being born in the 21st century or the 11th century. There are infinite levels to luck but it all really boils down to luck that is within your control (what I wrote about today), and luck which is not within your control (not worth spending any time worrying about, since you can’t do anything about it).

At the end of the day, we are all incalculably lucky to be alive. To have been born in the first place. To exist in this tiny sliver of a fraction of a fragment of a moment of time in this microscopic corner of the universe. There’s about 800 billion zillion trillion gajillion squillion katillion possible scenarios in which you never exist; in which I never exist. So we might as well be grateful and happy and consider ourselves lucky to be alive, to be here, and to exist.

And focus on the type of luck we can actually do something about.

Thanks for reading! In case you missed it, check out Monday’s post below 👇