Luck Surface Area

Luck Surface Area

"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." – Jason Roberts

The two components of the idea above:

1) Finding something you love.

2) Figuring out how to communicate it.

You have a built-in advantage in this process if the thing you love to do produces something you can share with the world.

This was an accidental discovery for me having pursued design as a career. Every day you make an artifact that follows you around forever.

In interviews, your background didn't matter - your work did.

"Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio." — Nassim Taleb

The above quote is taken slightly out of context (referring to financial positions) but the concept remains true.

In an increasingly digital world, finding a way to generate proof of work and publish it digitally is a way to compound your effort into the future, seeding relationships and opportunities that you can't conceive of in the present.

Luck Surface Area by Visualize Value

Leverage is as much about where you are standing as how much force you are applying.

If you are building something, it is far more useful to focus on the work you are doing to produce the result than the result itself.

The constraint we apply to package our idea determines their reach & resonance. "Make 1 decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."

Labor is generally a more interchangeable resource than vision.

To help understand this idea, consider the contrast between the two concepts ancient Greeks used to think about time.

It should be relatively simple to identify when we aren't accumulating net new experience, but in practice, it doesn't seem to be.

Language is an incredible tool. It makes it possible for us to externalize what we think and communicate it to others.