This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book (and builds on a couple of paragraphs in my original post on agency). I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the coming months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which is a signal about what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think!
One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff — socially, intellectually, professionally. It’s the rate of experimentation, the number of shots on goal, that provides the magic, not the percentage of successes, which might be very low at first.
It sounds stupidly simple, but it’s profound: the more times you interact with the outside world, the more chances you have to get lucky — to find the collaborators, friends, and projects that, together, provide the right soil for you to bloom in.
Conversely, people who move more slowly through life tend to get fewer shots on goal and have longer feedback loops. Perhaps they work privately on creative projects that they don’t show to anybody for months or years, or they stay in a relatively contained peer group for a long time time without mixing it up.
If someone is trying to figure out what to do with their life, and they’re meeting with 1-2 interesting strangers per day, then all things being equal, I’m inclined to bet on them; if they’re meeting 1-2 people per week, I’m inclined to think they are going too slowly, and aren’t likely to hit escape velocity.
So, what’s the most efficient and direct way to go about this? How do you figure out who the key people are, and ensure you meet them?
I think this is something you can’t really undertake with that kind of attitude. Some goals have to be approached like gardening. You can’t force plants to grow, you can only engineer the conditions in which they’re likely to flourish, and trust that the results will come.
Making your own luck is like this: As Steve Jobs put it, “you can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.” However, you can still increase your skill at being lucky. Much like skilled gardeners tend to produce lush gardens, skilled cultivators of luck tend to “randomly” accrue dense interpersonal networks.
What does skilled luck cultivation look like?
Operate from a place of genuine curiosity
... continue reading