What is luck? How do you manufacture it? Are there basic ways to create more luck? What would a general equation for serendipity look like?
\text{Luck} = \text{Openness} \times \text{Surface Area} \times \text{Preparation}
Note that sometimes “creating luck” is not really luck, just that you are prepared. Generally, my thoughts on luck isn’t that you’re optimizing to be the \frac{1}{\infty} universes where you succeed, but to ensure most of those will succeed. It’s about raising your expected value which means you have to have skills that just so happen to be augmented by luck.
Note
Your definition of success will change with age, so luck also changes. But, since it is ~impossible to predict how you will get lucky, then I think the previous luck you built will only ever compound over time even if your end states change.
Openness
In all honesty, I haven’t done the research on how deeply you can modify your personality to be open to new experiences. My guess is that you can change it quite a lot or just override your default, but this is a TODO.
Surface Area
How does one increase their surface area?
- Cold email
- Attend things you never would’ve
- Say yes to things
- Write
- Create artifacts and share it with the world
- Videos
- Cartoons
- Blogs
- Movies
- Music
- Etc.
- Host events
- Invite people to shindigs
- Think weird ideas
- Do weird things
Preparation
This means doing the work, whatever that means. It could be excelling at a job, or living virtuously, or writing a blog, or having deep technical knowledge. I will not quote Pasteur here because he has been quoted to death, but it is certainly true.