The luckiest thing I ever did was probably burning out, quitting my small-town engineering job, and then, after a few months, getting in at an AI-related SF startup before AI really took off, during that bubble when it was a little easier to get hired in general. That generated such an enormous volume of opportunity, growth, and well-connected friends that it makes my head spin.
Put another way: I had very few opportunities previously, and they weren't too good. I also didn't really have good ideas on how to get ahead. Now, it almost doesn't really matter what I do - every direction is incredible.
I'm not quite sure how to boil down this situation, but I'm not sure that it matches up to the article. My luck surface area is certainly larger now, but it mostly stems from one very well-timed decision, not from intentionally going out to make connections (I still struggle with that.)
I think there are also some good general lessons to learn for the tons of cases like yours.
First, I want to say that I don't think it was all luck. You put in hard work and you made it. I like the saying "the harder I work, the luckier I get." Luck gets you opportunities, work lets you take advantage of them. I say this first because I don't want anyone to read things as saying "you don't deserve it, you just got lucky". Luck doesn't detract.
> getting in at an AI-related SF startup before AI really took off
We spend so much time and effort for finding the best candidates. I think if we look at the history of things, this surprisingly doesn't matter as much as we might think. Huge companies have been built by people who on paper don't look the best. Some of these companies also take off by luck, or what we might call "timing." A lot of what matters is how a team or group works together. A lot of what matters is a candidate's potential, rather than where they are right now.[0]
I want to point this out not to say we should just roll the dice on every person that applies for a job. Rather I say this because like most things in life, there's noise. If we forget about the noise, we're going to be less accurate. Randomness is literally a measurement of uncertainty. While we should try to optimize certainty, we are unable to be absolutely certain. So it requires recognizing the noise if you want to be accurate.
I think we often make a mistake by ignoring noise. Or worse, thinking we've removed it. We don't talk about this as computer engineers, but if you talk to any physical engineer (like a mechanical engineer), or even a machinist, all measurements will include tolerances. That's uncertainty, noise. Without tolerances, designs are not good enough to physically make something. And, the machinists will just make some assumption for you, which you gotta roll the dice if they're going to have too small of tolerances, making your part worthless or overdo your tolerances, making you pay far more than the part should cost. I think it applies to us when programming too.
> My luck surface area is certainly larger now
And I think this is another important part (that can connect to what's been said above). Success gives us more opportunities. Importantly, these compound. Unfortunately, this means luck matters far more earlier on. I think we should recognize this as it plays a huge role when talking about juniors, high schoolers, college graduates, and so on. The difference between two random people starts small, but grows as they progress. If you took the same student and sent them to Standford they'd probably do better than if you sent them to some Cal State. The former is much more likely to give connections and internships while the latter might lead to none, even if the education was exactly the same.
Lastly, I just want to note that Veritasium has a video on luck and success. I think it is worth watching[1]. It's worth pausing the video at points, trying to make predictions about what he will say, and then continuing. Good way to challenge your own biases (or discover them!)
[0] It can be funny when people will spend so much looking for candidates but also say that degrees are worthless. There's probably a lot of these contradicting mindsets we all have (me included).
My opinion is success is difficult to copy and luck plays a huge part.
A better way is to observe the people who failed and failed miserably, and learn from their failures. My model of the world is that, for ordinary people, you are going to be exposed to some opportunities to succeed from time to time, but in a random fashion. You only need to catch one or two to be successful. So the key is NOT to maximize your success rate, but to make sure you never fell into a hole you cannot climb back, and prepare for the next opportunity.
But so far I have not seen any serious conference that focuses on failures. Everyone wants to learn from the winners. I’d hold a losers conference if I got the time.
> for ordinary people, you are going to be exposed to some opportunities to succeed from time to time, but in a random fashion
There's a saying I really love
The harder I work, the luckier I get
The way I interpret this is that by working harder you make yourself able to take advantage of more opportunities that come along. It "increases your surface area of luck", effectively. The opportunities still come at random, but work helps you capitalize on that luck. As a dumb trivial example, let's say you're a recent college graduate just having a drink at a bar. You just happen to talk to the person next to you and they tell you they're working in the space you studied and are hiring. If you didn't go to school, you wouldn't have been able to take advantage of that lucky situation.
I definitely agree that it is important to look at failures and learn from them. There's a large bias for ignoring luck's role in our (or others') success. Sometimes to the point of becoming superstitious, like replicating patterns of successful people that have nothing to do with their success (e.g. their daily routine). But when looking at failure, it is also important to remember Picard[0]
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is a weakness, that is life.
Sometimes people fail because they got unlucky. They did all the right things, but at the wrong time. This isn't the answer to all failures, but it is to some. It can be difficult to determine the difference, but just because it didn't work for someone before doesn't mean it won't work this time.
If luck plays a role for success, lack of luck plays a role in failure. With success, we tend to underestimate the role of luck. With failure we tend to overestimate it. In neither case can it be ignored.
Unfortunately, most proverbs, sayings, etc. have no quantifiable value, which makes all the difference when evaluating opportunities.
I like to say that I probably worked harder than many of the best soccer players in the world today when I was young, but I'm nowhere near their level. However, perhaps if I had talked to the right person, if I had made the right choice when choosing one team over another, I would have had a decent professional career instead of the mediocre one I had.
Maybe I should have worked 10% less and spent 70% more on “networking,” and my chances of making it would have increased by 30% or 20%. But no one knows. And even if you had a way to estimate these probabilities at the population level, the individual realization of random draws from the probability distribution would still be random.
Most of the time, it doesn't take more than 1 or 2 favorable random draws to get where others would die to be.
According to heritability estimates, I had a 5% chance of becoming much taller than my parents, which, we can all agree, is a pretty low probability, but it happened.
> A better way is to observe the people who failed and failed miserably, and learn from their failures
I've always wondered about this for startups: failure porn just feels so useful but my suspicion is that it is useless.
There's just too many different ways to fail.
Focusing time and energy on how to avoid failure just seems so wrong. Getting sidetracked. Unmotivated. However I do think one needs the right amount of fear, and one needs to avoid the failure modes for your particular startup and your particular personality.
Surely the right idea is to focus on competing to win.
I suppose part of the issue is that a lot of people don't really know how they got where they are. You can point to this or that traumatic incident as the watershed moment that made the difference in the wrong direction, but who's to say if that's really it? Maybe it was a completely different missed (or withheld) opportunity that they've completely forgotten, or can't confront because of what it would mean about their behavior or identity or the world we live in.
A conference that could cut through that and get to some real answers would be very valuable. I would call it a "burnout conference" though. It really seems like the terminology has changed recently; people say "loser" less and "burnout" more, perhaps in light of some recognition of:
(1) the seriousness of the circumstances (it's not a game)
(2) the personal nature of everyone's journey (it's not a competition)
(3) the degree to which a lot of this stuff is out of our control
(4) the toll the rat race takes on even the most strident
Suceess always seems random, but it really isn't. It involves about as much luck as anything in life.
As an example, if you studied for an exam and did well, was it because you didn't get into a car accident on the way or overslept or got sick when you needed to study? Or because you studied?
I have found that many people want to attribute all success as 'luck' due to their own insecurities.
Without the luck you'll not be able to get to the exam room. Lucky to not be disabled, to get an education, lucky to enroll the college, etc.
Almost all success is to have enough luck so there is a place for you. To have a place for you in uni, to have an open internship, to have an open position so you can step up the ladder, etc.
- Assume you’re always auditioning for a bigger role
- Give before you take
- Air your weirdness
- Host events
- A period of lostness is a part of it
i think some novel points (host events is good, i agree) but also the rest of this is fuzzy and unorganized. you can spend a lot of effort accumulating microlucks but not get anywhere and burn out completely and early.
This is related to the exploration–exploitation tradeoff studied in reinforcement learning [1], for which no universally optimal solution is known. This article suggests to explore more, but it might be wise to exploit your knowledge and be somewhat risk-averse every now and then as well.
Also, there is a difference between making decisions at the individual level and looking at the actions of all humans combined. A strategy that is sub-optimal for most individuals can still yield positive outcomes at the societal level. For example, it is fortunate that many people go into research, even though it is highly unlikely for an individual to find a massive breakthrough.
I learned about "explore vs exploit" in a fantastic book titled "Algorithms to Live By - What computer science can teach is about human decision-making" [subtitle from memory]
> the exploration–exploitation tradeoff ... for which no universally optimal solution is known
I want to nitpick a bit. It may be nuanced, but I think it makes a significant difference.
Exploration-exploitation is about a class of algorithms[0], and I would not say that means "there is no optimal solution." Rather, it is often applied to problems where there is no optimal solution. You can apply it to problems with known optimal solutions and it should still get you to the optima.
What problems don't have global optima? Most. Most problems we simplify in ways that will contain an optima, but it is best to remember the assumptions made and if they appropriately apply. This is part of why always maintaining at least some exploration can be a highly successful strategy. Extremely useful in the real world too as the environment is always changing. You cannot generate globally optimal solutions for dynamic problems where the future states are unknown.
[0] Examples include Q-Learning, Bandits, or sampling algorithms. Multiarmed bandits and Thompson Sampling are mentioned in the wiki but note that there are more bandit algorithms and more sampling algorithms.
Agree. I think it safe to say that we haven't found an optimal solution for the problem discussed in the article.
It's not even clear what the reward function should look like, so perhaps the comparison with reinforcement learning is not a productive one. Life combines both evolution and learning, and it's all rather complicated to say something sensible about it.
“Air your weirdness” is great advice. It’s framed here as “start a blog,” which can feel trite, but the larger point is powerful: don’t hide what makes you different.
I spent years smoothing out my quirks until I realized those quirks are what people find compelling. Ironically, aspiring influencers sometimes fake eccentricity. Think “Liver King”, when genuine oddity is far more interesting.
Another great way to increase your surface area for luck is being born in a first world country with access to a computer. I hear that has a good success rate!
As a person who was born in a third-world country, it's amazing (and a bit lucky for me) how many first-world folks can manage to squander this opportunity!
The irony to me is I am the opposite of the kid that got a computer in the 80s and learn to program on my own.
My parents were able to afford a $5k inflation adjusted Appl 2E and I never used it. I played a few games a few times but it mostly collected dust.
When we got the internet in the 90s, I mostly looked up what I could get high from and porn.
Then I spent a good decade drinking too much beer.
I blew every chance I had when I was young and have still done pretty well simply from being born at the right place at the right time.
I wasn't born with a lottery ticket, I was born playing a game of craps with weighted dice in my favor and was allowed to roll until I started winning.
We live in a society though of insecure douchebags with no self awareness to really gain perspective on how they won the powerball lottery of existence in terms of their time and place of birth. Make up fictional narratives on their own personal genius and "how you can too!".
Well no, because again, luck is just about seizing opportunities, so it’s all relative. Someone lucky in America may not fare well in Cambodia and vice-versa.
Many years ago, like maybe in the 1920s, the randomness of success in life was the focus of popular interest sufficiently to inspire scholarly research. I think it was mostly history professors who collected case studies of "lucky" people and tried to find patterns. I don't know how many publications resulted, but I read two or three books.
The books generally provided lists of observed patterns, usually at least a half dozen but sometimes a few times that. My takeaway from that reading was three general principles.
1. Location: The kind of events that you would consider relevant luck are not evenly distributed geographically. You need to be where they happen more often.
2. Preparation: At those locations, there will probably be multiple candidates waiting to take advantage of an opportunity. You need to aim to be the best candidate.
3. Flexibility: Your expectations for desirable opportunities have been molded by your limited knowledge of the world. You need to be ready to pursue opportunities that weren't exactly what you had in mind but may turn out to be just as satisfying.
TFA is hard to comment on because it feels like a rough draft. The reasoning could be sharpened. I have reservations about the "air your weirdness", because it seems to contradict the principle of flexibility.
For the curious, “luck surface area” was coined/popularized by Jason Roberts from the Techzing and Tropical MBA podcasts.
Our own patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) also helped propagate the concept.
The basic equation is L = D * T — that is, luck surface area equals doing times telling.
I think the author strays from the original concept a bit. She’s not necessarily wrong, but I get a sense of focusing on style over substance in most of her examples as compared to the original concept.
3. I imagine that Jason would be happy to talk to you if you contact him and tell him what you’re doing. He goes by jayro here on HN, but I am not sure how active he is on HN these days.
3. I think there were at least two main issues that LSA tried to address. One was capable tech people who were not finding work opportunities that were commensurate with their skill. Another was about the benefits of building in public. Which leads to…
4. Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN) built and sold two businesses publicly (Bingo Card Creator and Appointment Reminder). He was a big proponent of building publicly as a way to increase luck surface area, and I think that the strategy worked well for him. He also wrote a truckload on various sites including but not limited to HN. I imagine he would also be open to talking to you if you reach out
5. To provide some more constructive commentary about your excerpt, I get the sense that each of the headings are mostly byproducts of increasing LSA — namely, be passionate about something and talk to people about it. If you do that, then it’s easy to operate from a place of genuine curiosity, you will naturally (without trying) be auditioning for a bigger role, you will be giving before you take, and you will be airing your weirdness (although it’s probably not weird). Hosting events (overly specific) and a period of lostness (talking to the wrong audience?) just seem extremely peripheral to me in the discussion of LSA.
Anyway, thank you again for posting your excerpt. Best of luck!
People often underestimate risks too. I'm following a thread on another forum where a guy made his own solar power system. Seems like a risk that it might not work, but instead it burned his house down, oops. Fortunately no casualties.
You really have to play dungeons and dragons with yourself, thinking up imaginative possibilities of what might happen at every juncture. Don't worry about nuisance risks, but try to foresee the potentially catastrophic ones and mitigate them.
I've always felt that a key part of my success comes from an intense curiosity. The alternative of course is to have won the birthright lottery for generations in a row, but unfortunately I'm not that lucky.
This is my struggle. I'm intensely curious but have no prior super successes in my lineage so I still feel like I've only gotten so far and feel like I'm kind of stuck because I can't leave the job that pays my bills. I also wish I naturally wanted to broadly share my curious deep-dives but I can't find a format that wouldn't take away from the enjoyment of pursuing them.
> Talking to people without an end in mind other than satisfying your own curiosity is the slow way that is the fast way. People love to talk about what they’re interested in, and by extension love to talk to people who are genuinely curious about the things they’re interested in.
I feel like this is generally good advice just to grow as a person. I love hearing what people are into, even if it's not really my cup of tea. I get to learn something new that I probably never would have found on my own. Plus, I usually end up making a new friend.
It may very opinionated towards exactly what/where/etc you are looking for. Increasing the number of interactions may also increase the odds of bad outcomes. The rest of the owl should be put in the picture too.
Managing energy levels is my main bug here. Wish I had done this pre having kids but now with full time work and that I dont feel like socialising every day to this extent and moreover if I push through and do that I get more tired at work and underperform.
But I'm not a doomster so my plan is:
* Leverage stuff I have to do anyway at work for performance reviews. Initiatives means talking to new people at work.
* Attend school related social events.
* Family connections. No I'm not well connected like that, just chat to family.
If luck is something an ordinary person can grow, why is it when I click on posts like this the author is either "Cate Hall" or someone else I've already heard of dozens of times, and not somebody new?
"Increasing Surface Area for Luck? Don’t Just Show Up—Engage."
The advice to "increase your surface area for luck" by interacting more is half-right. The real leverage isn’t just volume—it’s receptivity.
Forced interactions ≠ luck. Dragging yourself to a party disengaged? Skimming a book you don’t care about? You’re not expanding opportunities—you’re a ghost in the room. Luck sticks to presence, not proximity.
Serendipity favors the prepared. Ever meet someone transformative because you were primed to listen? Or stumble on an idea because you were actively searching? That’s not randomness—it’s alertness meeting opportunity.
True "surface area" is neurological. It’s the difference between hearing and listening, attending and connecting. Optimize for depth of engagement, not just foot traffic.
TL;DR: Luck isn’t passive. It’s the collision of action and attention.
This reads like every single self-help book ever. "Grow and cultivate your network (and make sure you're genuine), dress for the job you want (or act like the job you want), other generic stuff about networking."
I don't know, I don't see an inherent issue with this, I think there's value in some things said here but I don't see a lot of value in "going out and meeting more than 1-2 people per week" or whatever. It feels like one of those things you read and get excited about then have no way to act because "Oh yeah let me just go meet people! At ... walmart maybe?"
Last week I entered the elevator in my apartment building and there were two women who started laughing and proclaimed “whoops we didn’t hit L”. I immediately replied “if that’s the worst thing that happens to you today you’re doing alright”. Followed by them replying “or it’s the beginning of a Dateline tragedy”.
We all had a good laugh then she introduced herself as the mother of the other woman who happened to be very attractive. We continued chatting and exchanged contact info.
I’m not sure anything will come of it but I do know that I had a much more pleasant and serendipitous elevator experience because instead of just smiling after they admitted their mistake, I threw out a silly reply which turned into what it did.
One of my biggest issues with American suburbia and car dependence is the much smaller percentage of reasonable opportunities for serendipity vs my old Spanish hometown.
This is for you and everyone reading, focus on making a friend first, not saying take it slow. If love blossoms great but if not maybe one of you two can meet someone via the friendship. I met my wife via a woman I met at a party. We went out a few times without any chemistry but I went to the beach w her and some friends and have been w my wife now 28 years. The rule for dating should be like camping "leave it (them) better than you found it (them)".
thanks! we've tried to do an ai + dating episode but havent really found the right angle. i think an alternative to status quo is desperately needed for the sake of human population but also economy
Returning to the main topic: the problem with networking is that the scale of sellers is much greater than the buyers, and those networks have hierarchies difficult to penetrate.
As someone from Spain, I asked an LLM about the L button and the Dateline tragedy just to assess how witty the situation was, it seems shared culture played big here. Also, I looked up about the serendipity reference, and there is a love film of 2001 in which elevator plays a romantic role. In my mostly scientific life L button, Dateline and serendipity has different meaning, furthermore luck and romance occupy infinitesimal space. To stay on topic, I really hope you luck and romance.
Host an event! My friends and I host a "project night" every Thursday where we invite people to bring whatever personal projects[1] they're working on, and we strongly encourage plus-ones. As long as you have a venue (we started in a bar about 45 minutes west of Boston) and know at least one or two other people who are willing to consistently show up every week and you all put the work into inviting new people that you like and encouraging the people you like to invite new people that they like, the momentum will build on itself such that you'll inevitably find yourself with a thriving community, undoubtedly meeting at least one or two totally new people (on average) every week!
[1] Projects have included: crocheting a bunch of adorable little stuffed cows, developing a privacy-first webapp for visualizing social graphs, painting the cosmos with oil on a wall-sized canvas, engineering the control system for a human-scale vending machine, building an automatic water turret which uses image recognition to shoot squirrels with water when they climb on a bird feeder, planning and beta testing LARPs, board games, social experiments, and so on and so forth.
> This reads like every single self-help book ever.
And every "business success" book ever. They're all just Survivor Bias. Have 1,024 people flip a coin 10 times, find the guy who flipped heads 10 times in a row, and have him write a book about what it takes to be a master coin flipper.
He/she probably has a technique. Life isn't a static probability chart. Coins have three sides in 3d space and will land on its side once in awhile. People learn how to toss a coin to get a certain result.
People only knew about the theorem and tried to solve it because a lot of people have already gossiped about it: "Oh do you remember that unsolved theorem? Oh what a story!"
Poor title. Increasing the role of luck in your life has no upsides. You should do everything possible to reduce lucks role in your life as it can't be relied upon and you can only (and have to) plan for bad luck.
Luck isn’t real anyways. It’s actually all about getting yourself in front of opportunities as often as possible, learning to recognize when they show up, and acting on them ASAP. That’s all it is. I consider myself extremely lucky, but that’s just another way of saying I’ve seen a lot of the opportunities in my life and consciously decided which to chase, rather than floating through the river of fate aimlessly.
This article could have been called "How to increase your surface area for opportunities to find you", because that's another component. You still have to recognize them and act on them, but these behaviors can potentially get more of those opportunities "into the funnel".
Scott Adams' book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" talks a lot about this, and is an enjoyable read, despite the author's current reputation.
As supplemental reading see "bulk positive randomness" as discussed here [0]. It is tempting, but fallacious, to imagine "luck" as a zero-sum, EV=0 (or worse) process across every domain of life, where all upside or alpha has long been arbitraged away. Yes, there are some domains where you want to minimize variance, like the distribution of transit times to the airport when you have a flight to catch, or the odds of being robbed in a bad neighborhood. But there are also many situations where meeting new people, trying new things, etc. have many upsides and few drawbacks, and for most people these are (1) common and (2) recognizable.
The luckiest thing I ever did was probably burning out, quitting my small-town engineering job, and then, after a few months, getting in at an AI-related SF startup before AI really took off, during that bubble when it was a little easier to get hired in general. That generated such an enormous volume of opportunity, growth, and well-connected friends that it makes my head spin.
Put another way: I had very few opportunities previously, and they weren't too good. I also didn't really have good ideas on how to get ahead. Now, it almost doesn't really matter what I do - every direction is incredible.
I'm not quite sure how to boil down this situation, but I'm not sure that it matches up to the article. My luck surface area is certainly larger now, but it mostly stems from one very well-timed decision, not from intentionally going out to make connections (I still struggle with that.)
The rising tide lifts all boats. Being great at something unimportant at some place going sideways does you no favors.
I think there are also some good general lessons to learn for the tons of cases like yours.
First, I want to say that I don't think it was all luck. You put in hard work and you made it. I like the saying "the harder I work, the luckier I get." Luck gets you opportunities, work lets you take advantage of them. I say this first because I don't want anyone to read things as saying "you don't deserve it, you just got lucky". Luck doesn't detract.
We spend so much time and effort for finding the best candidates. I think if we look at the history of things, this surprisingly doesn't matter as much as we might think. Huge companies have been built by people who on paper don't look the best. Some of these companies also take off by luck, or what we might call "timing." A lot of what matters is how a team or group works together. A lot of what matters is a candidate's potential, rather than where they are right now.[0]I want to point this out not to say we should just roll the dice on every person that applies for a job. Rather I say this because like most things in life, there's noise. If we forget about the noise, we're going to be less accurate. Randomness is literally a measurement of uncertainty. While we should try to optimize certainty, we are unable to be absolutely certain. So it requires recognizing the noise if you want to be accurate.
I think we often make a mistake by ignoring noise. Or worse, thinking we've removed it. We don't talk about this as computer engineers, but if you talk to any physical engineer (like a mechanical engineer), or even a machinist, all measurements will include tolerances. That's uncertainty, noise. Without tolerances, designs are not good enough to physically make something. And, the machinists will just make some assumption for you, which you gotta roll the dice if they're going to have too small of tolerances, making your part worthless or overdo your tolerances, making you pay far more than the part should cost. I think it applies to us when programming too.
And I think this is another important part (that can connect to what's been said above). Success gives us more opportunities. Importantly, these compound. Unfortunately, this means luck matters far more earlier on. I think we should recognize this as it plays a huge role when talking about juniors, high schoolers, college graduates, and so on. The difference between two random people starts small, but grows as they progress. If you took the same student and sent them to Standford they'd probably do better than if you sent them to some Cal State. The former is much more likely to give connections and internships while the latter might lead to none, even if the education was exactly the same.Lastly, I just want to note that Veritasium has a video on luck and success. I think it is worth watching[1]. It's worth pausing the video at points, trying to make predictions about what he will say, and then continuing. Good way to challenge your own biases (or discover them!)
[0] It can be funny when people will spend so much looking for candidates but also say that degrees are worthless. There's probably a lot of these contradicting mindsets we all have (me included).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I
Good for you, man!
Are you up for a chat, for fun and for career?
I started with AI six months ago at work and am feeling kind of lost where to take my career.
My email is in my profile.
My opinion is success is difficult to copy and luck plays a huge part.
A better way is to observe the people who failed and failed miserably, and learn from their failures. My model of the world is that, for ordinary people, you are going to be exposed to some opportunities to succeed from time to time, but in a random fashion. You only need to catch one or two to be successful. So the key is NOT to maximize your success rate, but to make sure you never fell into a hole you cannot climb back, and prepare for the next opportunity.
But so far I have not seen any serious conference that focuses on failures. Everyone wants to learn from the winners. I’d hold a losers conference if I got the time.
I definitely agree that it is important to look at failures and learn from them. There's a large bias for ignoring luck's role in our (or others') success. Sometimes to the point of becoming superstitious, like replicating patterns of successful people that have nothing to do with their success (e.g. their daily routine). But when looking at failure, it is also important to remember Picard[0]
Sometimes people fail because they got unlucky. They did all the right things, but at the wrong time. This isn't the answer to all failures, but it is to some. It can be difficult to determine the difference, but just because it didn't work for someone before doesn't mean it won't work this time.If luck plays a role for success, lack of luck plays a role in failure. With success, we tend to underestimate the role of luck. With failure we tend to overestimate it. In neither case can it be ignored.
[0] https://youtu.be/mr2Jdp4fdD0?t=38
Unfortunately, most proverbs, sayings, etc. have no quantifiable value, which makes all the difference when evaluating opportunities. I like to say that I probably worked harder than many of the best soccer players in the world today when I was young, but I'm nowhere near their level. However, perhaps if I had talked to the right person, if I had made the right choice when choosing one team over another, I would have had a decent professional career instead of the mediocre one I had.
Maybe I should have worked 10% less and spent 70% more on “networking,” and my chances of making it would have increased by 30% or 20%. But no one knows. And even if you had a way to estimate these probabilities at the population level, the individual realization of random draws from the probability distribution would still be random. Most of the time, it doesn't take more than 1 or 2 favorable random draws to get where others would die to be.
According to heritability estimates, I had a 5% chance of becoming much taller than my parents, which, we can all agree, is a pretty low probability, but it happened.
> A better way is to observe the people who failed and failed miserably, and learn from their failures
I've always wondered about this for startups: failure porn just feels so useful but my suspicion is that it is useless.
There's just too many different ways to fail.
Focusing time and energy on how to avoid failure just seems so wrong. Getting sidetracked. Unmotivated. However I do think one needs the right amount of fear, and one needs to avoid the failure modes for your particular startup and your particular personality.
Surely the right idea is to focus on competing to win.
I suppose part of the issue is that a lot of people don't really know how they got where they are. You can point to this or that traumatic incident as the watershed moment that made the difference in the wrong direction, but who's to say if that's really it? Maybe it was a completely different missed (or withheld) opportunity that they've completely forgotten, or can't confront because of what it would mean about their behavior or identity or the world we live in.
A conference that could cut through that and get to some real answers would be very valuable. I would call it a "burnout conference" though. It really seems like the terminology has changed recently; people say "loser" less and "burnout" more, perhaps in light of some recognition of:
(1) the seriousness of the circumstances (it's not a game)
(2) the personal nature of everyone's journey (it's not a competition)
(3) the degree to which a lot of this stuff is out of our control
(4) the toll the rat race takes on even the most strident
You might like FailCon. https://thefailcon.com/
It’s better not to lose than to win. Life is non-Ergodic.
Suceess always seems random, but it really isn't. It involves about as much luck as anything in life.
As an example, if you studied for an exam and did well, was it because you didn't get into a car accident on the way or overslept or got sick when you needed to study? Or because you studied?
I have found that many people want to attribute all success as 'luck' due to their own insecurities.
Without the luck you'll not be able to get to the exam room. Lucky to not be disabled, to get an education, lucky to enroll the college, etc.
Almost all success is to have enough luck so there is a place for you. To have a place for you in uni, to have an open internship, to have an open position so you can step up the ladder, etc.
This is obviously false.
Initial starting conditions are the biggest variable in the chaos of life.
No matter what your success in life, be born in Cambodia in 1970 and it is going to be hugely different.
You are really just repeating the delusional western perspective that completely takes for granted their own initial starting conditions as a given.
her suggestions
- Operate from a place of genuine curiosity
- Assume you’re always auditioning for a bigger role
- Give before you take
- Air your weirdness
- Host events
- A period of lostness is a part of it
i think some novel points (host events is good, i agree) but also the rest of this is fuzzy and unorganized. you can spend a lot of effort accumulating microlucks but not get anywhere and burn out completely and early.
my version: https://swyx.io/create-luck
basically classic advice is do more x talk more about what you do = surface area
can improve that by pursuing authentic curiosity as TFA suggests
but then i add in an element of strategic thinking - go to where luck is more likely to occur.
> https://swyx.io/create-luck
Thanks, really enjoyed this.
If everyone is hosting events, who will attend them?
We would still be cutting hair even if everybody was a hairdresser.
How can this be true? If my parents and spouse and friends were all hairdressers, I definitely would never pay for a haircut.
People who haven't read the book I suppose.
This would be a great problem to have. Most scenes don't have enough event hosts.
ai, of course
This is related to the exploration–exploitation tradeoff studied in reinforcement learning [1], for which no universally optimal solution is known. This article suggests to explore more, but it might be wise to exploit your knowledge and be somewhat risk-averse every now and then as well.
Also, there is a difference between making decisions at the individual level and looking at the actions of all humans combined. A strategy that is sub-optimal for most individuals can still yield positive outcomes at the societal level. For example, it is fortunate that many people go into research, even though it is highly unlikely for an individual to find a massive breakthrough.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...
I learned about "explore vs exploit" in a fantastic book titled "Algorithms to Live By - What computer science can teach is about human decision-making" [subtitle from memory]
Highly recommended!
Exploration-exploitation is about a class of algorithms[0], and I would not say that means "there is no optimal solution." Rather, it is often applied to problems where there is no optimal solution. You can apply it to problems with known optimal solutions and it should still get you to the optima.
What problems don't have global optima? Most. Most problems we simplify in ways that will contain an optima, but it is best to remember the assumptions made and if they appropriately apply. This is part of why always maintaining at least some exploration can be a highly successful strategy. Extremely useful in the real world too as the environment is always changing. You cannot generate globally optimal solutions for dynamic problems where the future states are unknown.
[0] Examples include Q-Learning, Bandits, or sampling algorithms. Multiarmed bandits and Thompson Sampling are mentioned in the wiki but note that there are more bandit algorithms and more sampling algorithms.
Agree. I think it safe to say that we haven't found an optimal solution for the problem discussed in the article.
It's not even clear what the reward function should look like, so perhaps the comparison with reinforcement learning is not a productive one. Life combines both evolution and learning, and it's all rather complicated to say something sensible about it.
“Air your weirdness” is great advice. It’s framed here as “start a blog,” which can feel trite, but the larger point is powerful: don’t hide what makes you different.
I spent years smoothing out my quirks until I realized those quirks are what people find compelling. Ironically, aspiring influencers sometimes fake eccentricity. Think “Liver King”, when genuine oddity is far more interesting.
Liver King doesn't seem to offer a lot of usable and positive lessons. Being weird and toxic is a well trodden path.
To be clear, I'm not pro liver king. Jut an example that came to mind.
Another great way to increase your surface area for luck is being born in a first world country with access to a computer. I hear that has a good success rate!
As a person who was born in a third-world country, it's amazing (and a bit lucky for me) how many first-world folks can manage to squander this opportunity!
The irony to me is I am the opposite of the kid that got a computer in the 80s and learn to program on my own.
My parents were able to afford a $5k inflation adjusted Appl 2E and I never used it. I played a few games a few times but it mostly collected dust.
When we got the internet in the 90s, I mostly looked up what I could get high from and porn.
Then I spent a good decade drinking too much beer.
I blew every chance I had when I was young and have still done pretty well simply from being born at the right place at the right time.
I wasn't born with a lottery ticket, I was born playing a game of craps with weighted dice in my favor and was allowed to roll until I started winning.
We live in a society though of insecure douchebags with no self awareness to really gain perspective on how they won the powerball lottery of existence in terms of their time and place of birth. Make up fictional narratives on their own personal genius and "how you can too!".
Being lucky once does not make you lucky later
No, but it can set the stage for being lucky later on. Warren Buffet calls it winning the ovarian lottery.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/warren-buffett-says-the-key-...
Well no, because again, luck is just about seizing opportunities, so it’s all relative. Someone lucky in America may not fare well in Cambodia and vice-versa.
Or being born to a King with great riches.
Many years ago, like maybe in the 1920s, the randomness of success in life was the focus of popular interest sufficiently to inspire scholarly research. I think it was mostly history professors who collected case studies of "lucky" people and tried to find patterns. I don't know how many publications resulted, but I read two or three books.
The books generally provided lists of observed patterns, usually at least a half dozen but sometimes a few times that. My takeaway from that reading was three general principles.
1. Location: The kind of events that you would consider relevant luck are not evenly distributed geographically. You need to be where they happen more often.
2. Preparation: At those locations, there will probably be multiple candidates waiting to take advantage of an opportunity. You need to aim to be the best candidate.
3. Flexibility: Your expectations for desirable opportunities have been molded by your limited knowledge of the world. You need to be ready to pursue opportunities that weren't exactly what you had in mind but may turn out to be just as satisfying.
TFA is hard to comment on because it feels like a rough draft. The reasoning could be sharpened. I have reservations about the "air your weirdness", because it seems to contradict the principle of flexibility.
For the curious, “luck surface area” was coined/popularized by Jason Roberts from the Techzing and Tropical MBA podcasts.
Our own patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) also helped propagate the concept.
The basic equation is L = D * T — that is, luck surface area equals doing times telling.
I think the author strays from the original concept a bit. She’s not necessarily wrong, but I get a sense of focusing on style over substance in most of her examples as compared to the original concept.
Oh my gosh, I have spent HOURS trying track down the original source of the term, thanks so much for sharing it.
Hi Cate,
Welcome to HN!
A few things:
1. Thank you for writing the book and providing the excerpt.
2. Here is a link to the original blog post by Jason: https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
3. I imagine that Jason would be happy to talk to you if you contact him and tell him what you’re doing. He goes by jayro here on HN, but I am not sure how active he is on HN these days.
3. I think there were at least two main issues that LSA tried to address. One was capable tech people who were not finding work opportunities that were commensurate with their skill. Another was about the benefits of building in public. Which leads to…
4. Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN) built and sold two businesses publicly (Bingo Card Creator and Appointment Reminder). He was a big proponent of building publicly as a way to increase luck surface area, and I think that the strategy worked well for him. He also wrote a truckload on various sites including but not limited to HN. I imagine he would also be open to talking to you if you reach out
5. To provide some more constructive commentary about your excerpt, I get the sense that each of the headings are mostly byproducts of increasing LSA — namely, be passionate about something and talk to people about it. If you do that, then it’s easy to operate from a place of genuine curiosity, you will naturally (without trying) be auditioning for a bigger role, you will be giving before you take, and you will be airing your weirdness (although it’s probably not weird). Hosting events (overly specific) and a period of lostness (talking to the wrong audience?) just seem extremely peripheral to me in the discussion of LSA.
Anyway, thank you again for posting your excerpt. Best of luck!
More links you might find interesting:
https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
https://alchemist.camp/metacast/luck-surface-area
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25968751 (11 years later, but still…)
https://www.kalzumeus.com/ (Patio11 blog with all of the details)
On 4, it's already happened and been recorded. See https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/stacking-the-odds-cate...
Fortis fortuna adiuvat. Fortune favours the bold. Just do it.
Take those risky leaps but I'd add that "luck" also favours the well-prepared.
If it has a high chance of success and not much downside to failure, it wasn't much of a risk then, was it.
I agree. Risks are often given too much weight in our imaginations. We psych ourselves out. Just do it. :-)
Risks that are imaginary can be real psychological barriers, fear-inducing, and life-limiting. So making those leaps is important, don't you think?
People often underestimate risks too. I'm following a thread on another forum where a guy made his own solar power system. Seems like a risk that it might not work, but instead it burned his house down, oops. Fortunately no casualties.
You really have to play dungeons and dragons with yourself, thinking up imaginative possibilities of what might happen at every juncture. Don't worry about nuisance risks, but try to foresee the potentially catastrophic ones and mitigate them.
I've always felt that a key part of my success comes from an intense curiosity. The alternative of course is to have won the birthright lottery for generations in a row, but unfortunately I'm not that lucky.
Curiosity is the opposite of fear, so this probably played a big part in you feeling comfortable enough to seize your opportunities when you saw them.
This is my struggle. I'm intensely curious but have no prior super successes in my lineage so I still feel like I've only gotten so far and feel like I'm kind of stuck because I can't leave the job that pays my bills. I also wish I naturally wanted to broadly share my curious deep-dives but I can't find a format that wouldn't take away from the enjoyment of pursuing them.
> Talking to people without an end in mind other than satisfying your own curiosity is the slow way that is the fast way. People love to talk about what they’re interested in, and by extension love to talk to people who are genuinely curious about the things they’re interested in.
I feel like this is generally good advice just to grow as a person. I love hearing what people are into, even if it's not really my cup of tea. I get to learn something new that I probably never would have found on my own. Plus, I usually end up making a new friend.
It may very opinionated towards exactly what/where/etc you are looking for. Increasing the number of interactions may also increase the odds of bad outcomes. The rest of the owl should be put in the picture too.
Managing energy levels is my main bug here. Wish I had done this pre having kids but now with full time work and that I dont feel like socialising every day to this extent and moreover if I push through and do that I get more tired at work and underperform.
But I'm not a doomster so my plan is:
* Leverage stuff I have to do anyway at work for performance reviews. Initiatives means talking to new people at work.
* Attend school related social events.
* Family connections. No I'm not well connected like that, just chat to family.
If luck is something an ordinary person can grow, why is it when I click on posts like this the author is either "Cate Hall" or someone else I've already heard of dozens of times, and not somebody new?
Today I was rereading an old link on the same topic from my bookmarks
https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
Mmm surface area * time = luck? You could also increase time to up your luck. Aka do nothing but just spend/waste time somewhere. This 100% works.
Do things, talk to people, engage. Note that this is different to “hustle”. Don’t try too hard to minmax, because that leaves no room for serendipity.
“Trust your luck, Taran Wanderer! But don’t forget to put out your nets!” - Llonio
Step 1: Be an extreme extrovert
Step 2: Do not be anything other than an extreme extrovert
For those that are flinching at this, there's a technique where you pretend you're someone else (extrovert persona) while going to network events.
e.g. pretend you're Tony Stark, a form of role playing (like how actors operate).
Not being interested in communicating with other humans has never helped with success.
It's like saying you want to swim, but refuse to touch water.
Another take along similar lines can be found in the book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow. Highly recommend.
"Increasing Surface Area for Luck? Don’t Just Show Up—Engage."
The advice to "increase your surface area for luck" by interacting more is half-right. The real leverage isn’t just volume—it’s receptivity.
TL;DR: Luck isn’t passive. It’s the collision of action and attention.This piece hits on the idea you can cultivate luck. It's about increasing your 'Luck Surface Area' (L = D x T: Luck = Doing x Telling).
My notes/ points that stood out for me:
- Actively seek diverse social, intellectual, and professional interactions. Each one expands your surface area for serendipity. TAKE MORE SHOTS!
- Don't go into interactions with an agenda. Real interest opens doors unexpected.
- Always aim for excellence. Even in small tasks. People notice this. A strong reputation pulls in opportunity.
- Give before you take. Offer attention, time, or resources without expecting immediate return. That builds high trust relationships.
- Share your authentic self. Put your unique thoughts out there. It's a magnet for those who truly resonate with you. Don't fake it.
- Host stuff. Simple, low pressure events work best. Taking the initiative to create connections is often more effective than just showing up.
Goes good with https://perell.com/essay/serendipity/
> Actively seek diverse social, intellectual, and professional interactions
The word is yes (Yes Man 2008)
Great film!
> Don't go into interactions with an agenda. Real interest opens doors unexpected.
Expectations are premeditated resentments. (from a 12-step friend)
This is the best title I've seen in a while.
This reads like every single self-help book ever. "Grow and cultivate your network (and make sure you're genuine), dress for the job you want (or act like the job you want), other generic stuff about networking."
I don't know, I don't see an inherent issue with this, I think there's value in some things said here but I don't see a lot of value in "going out and meeting more than 1-2 people per week" or whatever. It feels like one of those things you read and get excited about then have no way to act because "Oh yeah let me just go meet people! At ... walmart maybe?"
Last week I entered the elevator in my apartment building and there were two women who started laughing and proclaimed “whoops we didn’t hit L”. I immediately replied “if that’s the worst thing that happens to you today you’re doing alright”. Followed by them replying “or it’s the beginning of a Dateline tragedy”.
We all had a good laugh then she introduced herself as the mother of the other woman who happened to be very attractive. We continued chatting and exchanged contact info.
I’m not sure anything will come of it but I do know that I had a much more pleasant and serendipitous elevator experience because instead of just smiling after they admitted their mistake, I threw out a silly reply which turned into what it did.
One of my biggest issues with American suburbia and car dependence is the much smaller percentage of reasonable opportunities for serendipity vs my old Spanish hometown.
vs in denser cities too .... Cities in India in my case
are you going to ask the daughter out? we're invested in the story now
The building is hosting a party tomorrow so I was banking on a chance encounter there, but if not I think I’m going to have to.
This is for you and everyone reading, focus on making a friend first, not saying take it slow. If love blossoms great but if not maybe one of you two can meet someone via the friendship. I met my wife via a woman I met at a party. We went out a few times without any chemistry but I went to the beach w her and some friends and have been w my wife now 28 years. The rule for dating should be like camping "leave it (them) better than you found it (them)".
or it can just be a casual relationship, not everything needs to be wife goals maximum stakes all the time
I think I am going to activate notifications from here just to receive the outcome of this story.
sooo we're back for an update how'd it go
HN was probably the last place I'd expected to see a romance novella, but that makes it all the more intriguing. I hope OP asks the daughter out.
I think a latent space episode dedicated to luck, love and LLM could be well received.
thanks! we've tried to do an ai + dating episode but havent really found the right angle. i think an alternative to status quo is desperately needed for the sake of human population but also economy
Yes, it is basically an elevator pitch!
Returning to the main topic: the problem with networking is that the scale of sellers is much greater than the buyers, and those networks have hierarchies difficult to penetrate.
As someone from Spain, I asked an LLM about the L button and the Dateline tragedy just to assess how witty the situation was, it seems shared culture played big here. Also, I looked up about the serendipity reference, and there is a love film of 2001 in which elevator plays a romantic role. In my mostly scientific life L button, Dateline and serendipity has different meaning, furthermore luck and romance occupy infinitesimal space. To stay on topic, I really hope you luck and romance.
Yeah I have always wondered about the success rate for self help books. Seems like the people who need it have an inherent problem using it.
Host an event! My friends and I host a "project night" every Thursday where we invite people to bring whatever personal projects[1] they're working on, and we strongly encourage plus-ones. As long as you have a venue (we started in a bar about 45 minutes west of Boston) and know at least one or two other people who are willing to consistently show up every week and you all put the work into inviting new people that you like and encouraging the people you like to invite new people that they like, the momentum will build on itself such that you'll inevitably find yourself with a thriving community, undoubtedly meeting at least one or two totally new people (on average) every week!
[1] Projects have included: crocheting a bunch of adorable little stuffed cows, developing a privacy-first webapp for visualizing social graphs, painting the cosmos with oil on a wall-sized canvas, engineering the control system for a human-scale vending machine, building an automatic water turret which uses image recognition to shoot squirrels with water when they climb on a bird feeder, planning and beta testing LARPs, board games, social experiments, and so on and so forth.
This should just boil down to "say yes" to invites
It is a fair point.
But I found this article landed different than most self-help. It spoke in terms of mindsets one can adopt to do the things you mentioned.
And it made those mindsets compact/memorable so I'm more likely to use them.
hosting events (people come to you on your terms) > going to events (others)
For some reason many people find it acceptable to cancel their plans last minute just because.
Hell is (trying to herd) other people.
> This reads like every single self-help book ever.
And every "business success" book ever. They're all just Survivor Bias. Have 1,024 people flip a coin 10 times, find the guy who flipped heads 10 times in a row, and have him write a book about what it takes to be a master coin flipper.
the guy who flips the coin 100 times is more likely to get a long streak of heads
I count 9 at the end, not bad.flip it more times, that's the luck surface area
But look at all those tails! That person must be a failure at life and therefore justifies me never flipping any coin.
He/she probably has a technique. Life isn't a static probability chart. Coins have three sides in 3d space and will land on its side once in awhile. People learn how to toss a coin to get a certain result.
So there is nothing one can do to increase their odds of success? If there is, they can't write a book about it?
Fermats last theorem was notoriously proved by going to parties, socializing and making smalltalk /s
People only knew about the theorem and tried to solve it because a lot of people have already gossiped about it: "Oh do you remember that unsolved theorem? Oh what a story!"
[dead]
Poor title. Increasing the role of luck in your life has no upsides. You should do everything possible to reduce lucks role in your life as it can't be relied upon and you can only (and have to) plan for bad luck.
Luck isn’t real anyways. It’s actually all about getting yourself in front of opportunities as often as possible, learning to recognize when they show up, and acting on them ASAP. That’s all it is. I consider myself extremely lucky, but that’s just another way of saying I’ve seen a lot of the opportunities in my life and consciously decided which to chase, rather than floating through the river of fate aimlessly.
This article could have been called "How to increase your surface area for opportunities to find you", because that's another component. You still have to recognize them and act on them, but these behaviors can potentially get more of those opportunities "into the funnel".
Scott Adams' book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" talks a lot about this, and is an enjoyable read, despite the author's current reputation.
As supplemental reading see "bulk positive randomness" as discussed here [0]. It is tempting, but fallacious, to imagine "luck" as a zero-sum, EV=0 (or worse) process across every domain of life, where all upside or alpha has long been arbitraged away. Yes, there are some domains where you want to minimize variance, like the distribution of transit times to the airport when you have a flight to catch, or the odds of being robbed in a bad neighborhood. But there are also many situations where meeting new people, trying new things, etc. have many upsides and few drawbacks, and for most people these are (1) common and (2) recognizable.