Just start: Increasing your luck surface area
Hey team,
If you’re anything like me, then a lot of the biggest opportunities you’ve had in life have come down to luck. For instance, I got to write my first four actually-published book because someone at Scholastic happened to notice the advice column I was writing for a teen magazine: they couldn’t find a number for me, so they called the magazine, and the magazine were nice enough to put them in touch. Or: I used to train Brazilian jiu-jitsu at Roger Gracie’s academy, and one day someone at the academy I train was nice enough to tell me that I should definitely show up one evening because all-time UFC great Georges St Pierre was on the mats. I don’t know if that’s an experience money can’t buy, but buying it these days would be pretty expensive.
So are there things you can do to make yourself luckier? Well, maybe.
A concept that I came across recently that tries to tackle this question is the Luck Surface Area, created by an entrepreneur/coder called Jason Roberts. The way he puts it:
“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.”
Or, to put it another way, when you’re putting your energy into something interesting, some people are probably going to want to help. Maybe they'll want to help you, or partner with you, or just offer up an interesting bit of advice that you’d never have come across from your own perspective (another obsession of mine: working out ways to get more diverse perspectives on the stuff you’re working on).
Obviously, it helps if the thing you’re working on is interesting, because as Jason puts it:
“It's not just the expertise that's important, the very passion that created the expertise has value in its own right. This is because people want to be excited about things and passion is infectious.”
So I’d suggest that it’s not just important to do interesting stuff, but to be able to concisely explain why you’re doing it — work out an elevator pitch for whatever The Thing is, and you can quickly communicate it to other people. Some of them will want to help.
Have a great weekend!
PS I’m being a bit of a hypocrite here, because I can’t actually tell you what my biggest project, codenamed SWYA, is all about yet. But when I do, I hope it makes me a bit luckier.
Stuff I like
📝 Article - Has the pub quiz lost its soul?
Being from the UK, I love a pub quiz: they’re the perfect way to test your skill at rebuses and intros from 90s songs while also having a few beers with your pals. This piece, a sort of ode to the art of making a good one, discusses what happens when they’re increasingly being generated by robots — and if I can be annoying, I think there are lessons in there for creatives in general.
🎶 Musical - Groundhog Day
I watched this when it first came to London, and I should have gone to see it again before it tanked on Broadway, because it’s one of the best musicals I’ve ever seen and — I’m going to say it — actually better than the incredible film it riffs off in a whole bunch of ways. Let’s be honest, you’re probably not going to see to see it because I’ve recommended it, but at least listen to If I Had My Time Again, a song that makes me want to practice piano and learn French and go climbing. It’s now back in London.
🪶 Quote of the week
Rather than asking what might convince someone to change, catalysts start with a more basic question: why hasn’t that person changed already?
From The Catalyst by Jonah Berger
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