How to Create Your Own Luck

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According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “luck” is defined as either “a force that brings good fortune or adversity,” or “the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual.”

Luck, both good and bad, is easy to recognize:

• Good luck is betting on red in roulette and having the ball land on Red 23.

• Bad luck is placing this same bet and having the ball initially roll into Red 23, before ricocheting to Black 10.

• Good luck is striking up a conversation with the girl next to you in a coffee shop, not realizing that she will one day be your wife.

• Bad luck is a multi-vehicle wreck on the highway that makes you late for a job interview.

Luck is also difficult to quantify.

Did the tech-focused investors that outperformed over the last 13 years actually have an alpha-generating strategy, or did they just make a lucky bet that coincided with valuation expansion and declining interest rates?

Tom Brady is the undisputed GOAT, but would he have experienced the same level of individual success had Drew Bledsoe not suffered a near-fatal injury in Brady’s second season with the Patriots?

I have no idea. Luck can’t be quantified because there is no way to compare what did happen with the infinite potential alternatives that could have happened.

Even though we can’t measure luck, we can all agree that experiencing more good luck is a good thing. Believe it or not, we can actually create some of this good luck ourselves.

We all have a “luck surface area” which covers all of our potential opportunities for good fortune to strike. This luck surface area isn’t static, it’s malleable. As our luck surface area expands, our frequency of “luck” accelerates.

The best place to expand your luck surface area? The internet. Let me give you an example.

On November 2nd, 2021, my little finance blog was chugging along, gaining five new subscribers each day. But one day, while I was touring a history museum in Oxford, England, I glanced at my email and saw that 120 new readers had subscribed to Young Money in the last two hours.

At first, I thought my blog was glitching; I didn’t hit 120 new subscribers over the entire month of October, and now I was blasting through that in a single day. What happened?

After checking Twitter, I realized that Michael Batnick and Josh Brown had given one of my recent pieces a shout-out on their popular The Compound and Friends podcast, and now that piece was blowing up.

The piece in question: Play Dumb, Get Rich: The five dumbest ways you could have hit the jackpot in 2021.

This was a satirical piece making fun of everything from GameStop to NFTs, but I almost didn’t write it. In fact, I was working on something much lamer about a potential change in the capital gains tax, when I saw NotBoring’s founder Packy McCormick tweet a joke about how wealthy you could be by making five dumb financial decisions each year.

So I deleted what I was working on, wrote this satirical masterpiece, and shared it with him.

What happened next? Well, Packy liked the piece. In fact, he liked it enough that he shared it with his timeline:

Packy was a well-known writer with 100,000+ followers at the time, and some of those followers included Michael and Josh, who also liked the piece enough to mention it on their podcast.

But it doesn’t stop there. The next day, an editor from MarketWatch, one of the leading sources of financial news, emailed me asking if they could republish my piece on their site. Of course, I said, “Hell yes!” and their shoutout gave me 250 more subscribers the following week.

Almost 400 new subscribers from this one post, 55% readership growth overnight. You could say that I got lucky: I had no idea that Packy would share my piece, Batnick and Brown would give me a shoutout, or MarketWatch would republish it.

But I did shift the odds in my favor. Had I written a normal blog about any other topic, the odds were very low that the right person would read it, share it, and cause it to go viral. But I didn’t write a normal blog about any other topic. I wrote a satirical post based on an idea that a well-known writer had tweeted about, and I shared this post with him hoping that he would enjoy it and possibly share it. And it worked.

Normally, I was just publishing to my small following each week.

But this time, I leveraged Packy’s much larger audience…

And it took off from there. Luck = created.

Of course, luck surface area isn’t just a digital phenomenon. In fact, it’s even more relevant in the real world, where you have the chance to forge much stronger in-person connections.

Something that I quickly realized after moving to New York is that 1) everyone lives in New York, and 2) everyone who doesn’t live in New York eventually visits New York.

All of us have had serendipitous encounters that improved our lives, and the frequency that serendipity visited me went through the roof as soon as I moved to the city.

Back in August, I tweeted that I was moving to New York, and Liam Killingstad, a Twitter acquaintance of mine who I had only previously spoken with once on a Zoom call, messaged me and asked where in the city was I moving. When I told him Hell’s Kitchen, he said he lived close by and offered to come help with the move.

We have since become good friends who regularly hang out, and we’re also looking to collaborate on a project between my blog and his startup.

I had a similar experience when Danny Miranda, who hosts one of my favorite podcasts, texted me that he was in the city for a few days and asked if I wanted to grab a coffee. A few weeks later, I was on his show, and now he’s one of my go-to guys for bouncing ideas off of.

I was able to meet one of my favorite finance writers, Morgan Housel, last time he was in New York, and our conversation was invaluable to me as I was planning out the next steps of my career.

Was there luck involved in all of these meetings? 100%. I needed to be in town at the same time that the other party was visiting, or I needed to live in an adjacent neighborhood, or… you get the idea. But by living in New York, the odds that some of these encounters would occur increased exponentially.

I created some of that luck.

And yes, all of these NYC stories shared one thing in common: each relationship or connection started online.

There are levels to luck, and these levels compound. Being active on Twitter and regularly sharing my content increased the odds that I would connect with interesting people online. Moving to New York increased the odds that some of these connections would deepen as we crossed paths in real life. None of it was guaranteed, but I had shifted the odds in my favor.

This idea of luck surface area applies to everything. If you go to a top school, you have more opportunities to land a competitive job. If you stay invested in the market for a long time, you have more opportunities to generate outsized returns. The list goes on and on.

You might not be able to measure luck, but you can certainly create it.

- Jack

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