Brain Food #675
Luck Surface Area
Thoughts of the day
A mental model that more of us should follow, is the one of Luck Surface Area, which simply suggests that we can make our own luck. The term, coined by entrepreneur Jason Roberts, means the following:
“If there's one thing I've discovered in recent years it's this. 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.”
Are you spending your time doing something - or maybe more than one thing - that you are passionate about? Are you telling enough people about it? To share our work on something we love is not necessarily boastfulness. Perhaps this misconception is why there are so many artists and writers whose work only came to be appreciated post-humously.
What is important to remember from this model, in the spirit of expectations that will always fail us, is that even if we do end up receiving recognition for something, it may not be in the way we expected it to arrive: “The reason is that when people become aware of your expertise, some percentage of them will take action to capture that value, but quite often it will be in a way you would never have predicted. Maybe they'll want to hire you, or partner with you, or invest in you, or who knows what. But in whatever way it happens, it will be serendipitous.”
The idea is simple, but powerful. We should not passively wait for luck to come find us, or try to control it; we should create enough opportunities to let luck in.
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