I’ve always loved dreaming up ideas for stories.
One premise I recall vividly was a world in which everyone is born with a limited amount of luck. People could then either “save” that fortune and live to be a hundred years old by spending it conservatively, or use it all up in their youth, flaming out in a fiery blaze of glory.
This, of course, is not how luck works. It's not something you can hoard, and it isn't finite.
The world is a fundamentally chaotic place, governed by coincidence and chance. I've seen how small, seemingly insignificant decisions can have profound consequences. And at every interval on this spectrum, the range of outcomes can vary wildly.
Still, I have always considered myself incredibly lucky. In the last year alone, journaling a couple times a week, I wrote thirty-two entries that mentioned how “lucky” I felt about something. I've been fortunate in my friendships, blessed with strong family relationships, and positioned to take risks with my time.
But I still journal frequently about choices I have yet to make. What the right decision is. After all, there are some decisions that will very obviously impact your life. If or where to attend college. If you leave. Where you choose to live afterwards. Your life partner. Your career.
While you can prepare for and deeply consider these choices, there are so many other things that affect these decisions that are very chance-dependent. Your location and background, the genetic lottery you enter the world with. The universe does grant people a form of luck at birth, just not the same amount.
And then in life, some people are lucky and some people are unlucky, apparently arbitrarily. A significant amount of the time, your life is out of your control and small decisions you’ll never acknowledge will have a massive impact on you.
A butterfly's wings flap in Brazil, and a tornado forms in Texas. You could meet the love of your life tomorrow. Or you or someone you care about could die. These things do not happen for a reason.
You can only control for yourself. So how can you optimize for serendipity?
Seneca once said, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." In practice, this means increasing our "surface area" and accelerating our efforts.
A certain Sam has talked about how luck “increases super-linearly with more surface area – meeting more people, making more connections between new ideas, learning new patterns.” My friend Tina Mai also wrote an incredible piece about exactly this – how being found is about being findable. How getting lucky is about putting yourself in a position to get lucky.
This means being prepared when opportunity knocks. Think college admissions - there's no perfect application that guarantees entry into an Ivy League university. Every single student who attends Harvard or Yale is lucky their application was chosen from a sea of similarly-qualified applicants. But they also had to meet certain thresholds, achieve impressive extracurriculars, and tell a compelling personal story.
Send the right email, attend the right dinner, sit in the right seat. Building and maintaining a diverse network increases the chances of serendipitous connections and opportunities. Every new connection forged, every skill honed, every idea explored - these are the seeds we scatter, without knowing which might take root and blossom into something extraordinary.
The digital age has completely reshaped how luck can manifest, amplifying serendipity in ways our ancestors could scarcely dream of. Anything you put online can spread virally, for better and worse. The internet has massively increased, commoditized, and in many ways leveled the surface area for luck (at least in tech).
And this also plays into the second aspect, acceleration.
Effort, and the luck that it can evoke, compounds. One door opens two more opens two more opens two more. The butterfly effect is very real – and directable. It is a stack of dominoes toppling over, falling faster and faster. Becoming the best at what you do is a way to stand out, and as you push further in any particular direction, you increase the chances that "fortune will find you."
Figuring out the direction you seek to move in is easier said than done. But as Naval says, if you refine what you do until this is true, opportunity will seek you out.
Luck isn't just chaos. It can become destiny.