Make Yourself A Big Target For Luck
“What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action.”
“You can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.”
I am always down for a good story. It’s the framing I try to follow when making decisions. I find life to be richer that way. As an old adage might say, everything is either a good time or a good story. When things go right, you achieve your desired outcome. When things go wrong, you at least get a good story. And sometimes you get the best of both worlds: a good story and a good time. However, to ever be afforded these luxuries, it requires me to see and be seen.
I can’t scroll my way to a purpose. I am capped on the meaningful connection I can develop from my phone. I must get out in the world to make life happen. In the digital age, it is easy to neglect these efforts and instead hide at home, but that encourages a passive management of my life. It assumes my problems will solve themselves, and my goals don’t require action.
Instead, I should relish in action, knowing it is a remedy to anxiety and a way to silence the fears I have of not obtaining what I want in my life. Of course, I don’t have a How to Manual on the actions I should take to achieve my desirable outcomes, but I can maximize serendipity to help me get to where I want to be.
Paul Graham talks about it in “How To Do Great Work”,
“What should you do if you’re young and ambitious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.”
Now, it extends beyond the work we do and encompasses all of life. People talk about optimizing personal growth, cognition, career trajectory, etc., but as Paul Graham highlights utmost importance lies in maximizing serendipitous encounters. Talk to people. Ask questions. Go to that workout class.
Sit at a bar on a beach alone, and you might land next to an ESPN personality who blasts out your resume to his connections. Go to the grocery store, and you might see a friend you haven’t seen in years while picking through the strawberries. Say yes to introductions offered by a coworker when you both happen to leave work together, and chat on the way to your cars. Soon, it might help land your next job.
No matter how the digital age continues to transform, the desire to see and be seen continues to operate at a premium. It isn’t a systematic procedure, but through lots of action making myself a big target for luck do I realize it. And as much as I love digital innovation and should leverage the tools to enhance my life, this can’t be automated. As David Brooks says in How to Know a Person,
“Artificial Intelligence is going to do many things to us in the decades ahead, and replace humans at many tasks, but one thing it will never be able to do is create person-to-person connections. If you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better become exceptionally good at connecting with others.”
Jobs, relationships, and connections will always be a foundational piece of our lives. These are all a product of our efforts. I landed the job because I networked and created connections to help diminish any unknowns. I enhanced my college experience by saying yes to everything. Maximizing serendipity is a way to manufacture my own luck in a time when people complain about being unlucky.
Steve Jobs talks about it. He had a standing invite to speak at Stanford once or twice a year. On a Thursday night, he was slated to speak to a group of students, but didn’t feel well, and later that night, dinner with some important customers was on the menu. He could have declined the invite, but decided to march on anyway.
He arrived to a crammed lecture hall. Students spilled into the aisles. However, a professor asked everyone to evacuate the aisles should the fire marshal appear. Trying to comply with the professor’s direction, a girl scurried into one of the four reserved seats, presumably for Steve Jobs and his crew, in the front. She landed right next to Jobs as he waited to address the crowd. He began his speech, but knew something was up. No, it wasn’t the illness plaguing him. No, his mind wasn’t drifting to the meeting later that night. Instead, “I was staring at her, forgetting what I was talking about mid-sentence.” Afterwards, realizing he might never see the girl who sat next to him again, he caught her in the parking lot and asked if she would go out to dinner with him that night. He was happy to cancel any prior commitments. 18 months later, they were married. You never know when you’ll meet someone who might change your life.
This extends beyond romance. Maybe it’s best viewed in the context of life being a series of lotteries. You can’t plan the people who will change your life. You can’t optimize everything for the perfect time. You can’t live like a hermit crab and reduce serendipity. You can’t map out every portion of life and follow it verbatim. It’s random.
However, you can maximize the number of tickets you have when the numbers are drawn. You can try to always talk to those you find interesting. You can be ready for what life throws at you. You can get out in a world understanding that nothing may happen, but you are at least allowing something to happen. Maximizing serendipity is an active engagement with the world to increase those lottery tickets and up those chances. Good times nor good stories will never occur if you just sit around waiting for them to happen to you.
Appreciate you being here.
-Scantron