🍀 How to be more lucky: My 6 Vs of luck.

Poor people often think they need to “get lucky” to become rich and/or successful. However, luck isn’t lucky. I believe being lucky is a skill.

You can increase your “luck surface area”, and I’m going to tell you how.

First, your surface area of luck. I first came across this idea when I watched an episode of Derren Brown on “The Secret of Luck” many years ago. One guy stood out to me - no matter what happened, he never found his luck - “Because he had never won before he thought he never would” (~14 mins in). It blew my mind. It made me realise that I was at least partially responsible for my luck.

Luck is constantly raining down around us, we need only increase our chances of receiving some.

Tina Seelig said “Luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic. It’s much more like the wind, blowing constantly. Sometimes it’s calm, and sometimes it blows in gusts. And sometimes it comes from directions that you didn’t even imagine.”

Luck is raining down, how do you catch it? Luck surface area

So how do we increase our luck?

Unlucky people think there is only one kind of luck, but I think there are 6 kinds of luck:

1. Volume luck: you take more shots than others

2. Variance luck: you do more different things than others so get exposed to more and can better spot novel links between things

3. Vision luck: you’ve got improved skills and you see things that other people don’t

4. Victory luck: you worked on building a reputation so now people bring the opportunity to you

5. Vicinity luck: you put yourself in the right place and so stumble upon luck

6. Vagary luck: you can’t control this, e.g. where you were born. Random.

   
   

Five out of six are things that you can control, they are types of luck that you make. Only one type of luck, vagary luck, happens to you. The rest are thing you make happen.

I have written before about how increasing your volume and your variance increases your “luck”. As for the other kinds here are some things you can do:

• Vision luck: Learn complimentary skills, speak with people who have different viewpoints, take time to be creative and “link” things that aren’t similar

• Victory luck: Tell many different people what you do, share success stories, help others

• Vicinity luck: Spend time on relevant forums/online channels, move to a city with more of the kinds of people you want to be around (most famous example of this is tech bros moving to Silicon Valley in years gone by)

• Vagary luck: Welcome it (open the scratch card!), appreciate it when it comes

  
  

Sahil Bloom’s lucky break, his “overnight success”, looked like luck but it was not. He had done each of the 5 Vs of luck, and ended up achieving the 6th because of it.

You can do the same. You can increase your luck.

Luck surface area: doing vs telling people for Victory and Volume luck

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-september-24

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