CONNECTING THE DOTS

We call people Lucky, as if fortune were randomly distributed. It is the byproduct of specific behaviours. Lucky people aren’t born different – they operate differently. They’ve built what some call a Large Luck Surface Area: the total contact zone between themselves and opportunity.

Think of it like catching rain. You can’t control when it rains or how hard. But you can control the size of your bucket – through their habits, their networks, their visibility, and their openness to the unexpected. The formula is simple: more exposure to opportunity, plus better positioning to recognize it, plus enough resilience to stay in the game until the big break arrives.

1. Take more shots: In domains where outcomes are unpredictable and few big wins dwarf everything else, the only reliable strategy is increasing your number of attempts. You cannot predict which shot will hit, so take more shots.
2. Volume beats perfection: each project, pitch, or attempt has roughly equal odds of being ‘the one’. Prolific creators aren’t luckier per attempt, they just have more tickets in the lottery.
3. Experiment fast, kill fast: try things quickly, get feedback, and adapt. When something isn’t working, stop and redirect rather than persisting on a dead-end path. Speed of iteration matters more than perfection of execution.
4. Action creates options: when in doubt, do something. Each action creates new possibilities, new feedback, new contacts, new lessons. Sitting and planning gives you no real-world opportunities. Imperfect action beats perfect inaction every time.
5. Your rate of encounters matters:  if you’re meeting one or two interesting strangers per day instead of per week, you’re compounding opportunities far faster. Each interaction is a ticket in a lottery whose prizes you can’t anticipate. Increase your collision rate with the world.
6. Be visible: excellent work that remains hidden generates zero luck. People cannot offer you what they don’t know you want. The goal is to create “inbound opportunity” by making your work, interests, and expertise discoverable.
7. Do things and tell people: your luck is proportional to both the work you create and how many people know about it. Neither compensates for the other; excellence hidden has no surface area. You need doing and telling.
8. Own your Name Online: Get your own domain. Make yourself discoverable. When opportunity comes looking, you need to be findable. A consistent online presence with your name, a body of work, and contact information creates permanent, searchable proof of competence.
9. Weak ties beat strong ties for opportunity: casual acquaintances – not your close friends – are often your most valuable assets for discovering new possibilities. Casual acquaintances bridge you to entirely different worlds, exposing you to information and chances you’d otherwise never encounter.
10. Bridge disconnected groups: position yourself as the connector between communities that don’t normally talk to each other. These gaps are gold: you get early access to diverse information, you can import solutions from one world to solve problems in another, and you become invaluable.
11. Talk to strangers: push past the comfort zone and start conversations with new people.
12. Don’t burn bridges.
13. Go where opportunities congregate.
14. Embed yourself in a SCENE. Great work often emerges from clusters of talented people who elevate each other.
15. Build Unique combinations: Develop unusual combinations of skills, interests, or expertise.
16. Protect your downside ( to win the game, stay in the game): increasing the probability of luck is futile if bad luck can destroy you. The goal is to stay in the game long enough to harvest the eventual wins, which requires surviving the inevitable setbacks along the way.
17. Seek Asymmetric Bets: look for opportunities with limited downside but unlimited upside. These asymmetric bets stack the odds in your favour: small failures cost little, but occasional big wins propel your forward dramatically.

If you have more ideas to further expand the list, please leave it in the comments.