Most people get luck wrong. I realized this when I changed my behaviour in one or two ways and suddenly got luckier.
When explaining luck, people will give you the example of the lottery winner. Winning is an unlikely event. And positive. When these two factors come together, it’s luck.
This explanation is the most common, but it overlooks the most important element of luck, namely, that the winner participated. By buying a ticket, they exposed themselves to luck. If they hadn’t bought the ticket, they never could have won. The winner created a surface luck could hit.
You can choose to get luckier by expanding this surface.
I’m not saying you should buy lottery tickets. What I am advocating for is increasing your exposure. Let me put it this way.
Watching Netflix all day creates no exposure. You are in a bubble. You aren’t meeting new people. You are shielded from any chance that may be out there. The only way for you to get lucky in this situation would be if an opportunity literally fell out of the sky.
Luck wants to find and reward people. This is the key takeaway here, and what I kept in mind as I changed my behaviour. Luck is out there to find you. But when we close ourselves off, like the person watching TV all day, we’re turning off our GPS. Luck has a hard time finding us. And surprisingly, most of us behave this way.
So how do you increase your surface? By creating and connecting.
My favorite way to get exposed to luck is to create. A book, a company, a video, a post, a tweet, anything. By creating this blog post, I am putting something out in the world. I am increasing my exposure. Perhaps someone likes what I write and we talk, leading to a beautiful friendship, an opportunity, or whatever else. Now, to be lucky, something doesn’t have to fall out of the sky, it can just land in my inbox.
You’ll notice that creators, especially those who are consistent, seem to have lots of opportunities. They know people, they have a reputation, they get deals. Their surface is so large that luck hits them every single day. They get to the point where they have to actively reject opportunities. They are literally luckier than they can handle. This is one way.
A different yet similar way to get luckier is to just connect with people. For most of my life, I was the guy whose default answer to invites was “no”. I realize now this closed me off to countless opportunities. If you have an Internet connection, you can do this. Join webinars. Connect with other people who like the same things as you. Sign up to meetup websites, reply to comments, contribute to the conversation. Be the person who chats, who puts themselves out there, whose name is known, even if in small circles. Just by virtue of being this connected, you’ll have access to opportunities locked to many.
Create, connect, expose yourself. Do this long enough and suddenly you’ll get “lucky.”