on luck

im a pretty lucky dude

its a bit unsettling when my peers say that my technical skills are cracked, alluding to my past google internship, because i’m really not marginally better than any of them. this isn’t from a place of humility, the thing that smart people do when they say they’re not that smart and then ace every exam. the cold hard truth is that - i am simply your average, run of the mill, software engineering student from a non-target school in canada. if there’s one thing that might separate me from them is that i just might be a bit more lucky.

for around a year now, i’ve been thinking about where i am compared to my peers, and the conclusion i landed at was that to be successful, you want to maximize your surface area of luck, and then be skillful to capitalize on an opportunity. 

take the mona lisa for example. could you honestly tell me what makes the mona lisa so successful (popular) as a painting? in an attempt to scrutinize physical qualities, you might realize that, sure while it might look good, it isn’t so different to many other pieces in the gallery. but because of some twisted luck, it was stolen - which garnered immense press, and thus, success. 

i’m not going to compare myself to the mona lisa, but i would argue we (and you!) might not be so different. i’m definitely not the smartest tool in the shed, just like how the mona lisa wasn’t the most beautiful painting in the gallery, but the fact that i am a tool in the shed and she is a painting the Louvre means that we were competent enough to get the job done. but because of some lucky events in mine and in the mona lisa’s life, we are able to enjoy varying levels of success. 

with the weight of the entire internet in your pocket, luck may now be more important than ever. robert h frank, an economics professor at cornell wrote that because we are so much more connected to everyone, the stakes are higher now, so even the slightest advantage matters. as the age old adage says, the early bird gets the worm - while every bird is perfectly capable of getting their own worm, this slight edge might be the difference in getting the worm or not. 

over the course of my life, i have benefitted from a lot of luck. i was born to parents who were well off, in a first world country, and had no significant barrier to education, housing, or food. i was lucky that my parents pushed me to be better and better, lived close to a high ranking school in the district, and to have inherited their genetics for drive, and perseverance. i was lucky that i grew up before cell phones and big media companies destroyed the early childhood i once had. these small bubbles of luck are a big reason why i am where i am today. sure i worked hard, but its not like any of my peers didn’t. 

these small cumulations of luck creates a positive feedback loop. this positive feedback loop happens because of an infinite amount of events that happens every day. an event (i.e turning left instead of right) fires more events - and if you string enough events across enough people, events that are prohibitively unlikely in any given instance suddenly become all but inevitable. 

for me, this was landing the google internship (im not saying it was inevitable). there’s dozens of thousands of applicant every summer, so if you ask a statistician, the chances of this event happening is very small. here’s four chain of events that somehow happened that led to this happening:

• being musically inclined, and picking up the ukulele on a whim in 9th grade, and then practicing often to a level where i could then transpose my favourite songs

• hearing my high school band play danzon no 2, and being absolutely floored by it that it stuck in my head more than 4 years later

• posting on linkedin the year before, getting sick of it, and then checking out tech twitter, which happened to be peaking at the time (2022)

• the twitter algorithm showing @chaoticdesign my cover of danzon no 2, and him being inclined to reach out to me to hang out, and eventually helping me throughout the application process with a referral, guidance, and mentorship

this perfect storm of seemingly random events strung together to skyrocket the chances of getting the internship, which was statistically, super low. see, if i (and @chaoticdesign) wasn’t into music, or my high school band didnt play danzon no 2, or if i didnt decide to go on twitter, or if @chaoticdesign didnt see my post, none of this wouldnt have ever happened. on a high level, this seems crazy enough already - but theres way more events that happened under the hood that also strung together to make these chains of events happen (i.e the story of how @choticdesign got into google). so when people ask how i got the internship, and i say that i “got lucky”, this is what i mean.

so while one part of success from luck is just for things to happen (which is out of your control), you can actually increase your luck by maximizing your surface area for it. i think of luck like a vector instead of a binary - it has magnitude and direction. if you cast your luck in a certain direction, you’re more likely to get the kind of luck you want. if you increase the magnitude of your luck, the more lucky you will be. and if you cast your luck in a direction with enough magnitude, you can propel yourself to where you want to be, much faster! maximizing your surface area of luck is thereby casting your luck in several directions with enough magnitude. 

so how can you by maximizing your surface area of luck? to change direction, touch grass. to increase magnitude, help others.

in non-cs terms, touching grass just means to go out and do stuff. go get some dad lore! go talk to people. joining different groups also changes your direction for luck, if you join a tech circle, the chances of a tech-related event popping up is higher than if you joined a rec soccer league. that’t not to say your team’s goalkeeper isn’t the ceo of the next big startup, but its just less likely. in any situation, the number of events that spawn from touching grass makes it more likely for something to happen out of it. and if you touch the right kind of grass, you might just get the right kind of event. it’s like looking for a four leaf clover, you wouldn’t look in the sea for one.

next, why would helping others increase the magnitude of your luck? i mean, the belief in karma exists for a reason, and as the saying goes, whatever goes around, comes around. the more you help others around, and give back, the more likely they are to return the favour. i mean, if you were able to hire someone, you might be more inclined to hire a friend, because they’ve likely helped you out throughout the years. this concept of helping others shouldnt be transactional, or equal by any means, but the more you put into other people, the more you might get out of it. and once again, the direction can also be changed when it comes to the type of people you help (field, personality, etc).

i feel like people inherently do this, without noticing. for example, if you want a job in tech, you go to hackathons, workshops, and other tech related events (direction). you would also befriend others in tech, for which you might gain mentors, peers, and mentees (magnitude). so when you compound all of your events across all of your connections, something positive is bound to happen.

i mean it seems intuitive, if you work hard, you will succeed. but because of how many ways there are to work, the type of work matters. while studying might marginally increase your magnitude of luck, making friends with others that can further your career might increase it even more. it’s like the adage “its not about what you know, but who you know”. who you know expands your surface of area for luck, and thereby increasing your chances of success.

but at the end of the day, its still about skill. i’m not trying to diminish anyone’s success and cough it up to luck - im sure they’ve all worked hard to get to where they are, but i invite everyone to think about an event that happened in their life that was lucky, and how it’s helped them get to where they are today. im advocating that if you want to get the success you want, you should still work hard, but also try to get a bit lucky. success is a blend of talent, effort and luck. talent and effort takes up an equal portion of 98%, but to truly by 100%, you need that 2% luck.

reads: 

• Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H Frank

• Why the myth of a perfect meritocracy is so pernicious (also with Robert H Frank)

other notes:

this was written after reading success and luck, and i feel like i got tricked into reading an economics book, the way the last couple of chapters panned out. i wanted to write this because according to frank, people who acknowledge good luck, tend to give back, after all, why drive a ferrari when the roads are ridden with potholes?

frank also talks about a good deal on why some people downplay luck, and why its bad as a society that we do that. and to sum it up, we want to “own” our successes, that the effort we put in have had to amount to it, even when our failures were simply because of luck. we also feel the effects of bad luck more than good luck, try searching up headwind (bad luck) versus tailwind (good luck). in addition, because success can be seen as a monetary value, something we’ve “earned”, taxation feels like theft. 

as a society, if we are more likely to give back if we acknowledge the role of good luck in our lives, we could foster future growth and prosperity. extensive public investment was an essential precondition for economic prosperity of the successful, and if they don’t give back, we cant have public investment for the future.

its a fascinating read, and i’m glad to have stumbled upon it. by luck, i was reading a article my friend read 9 months ago (from curius) about the case against empathy, and they briefly mentioned luck, which led to me finding the book. 

go read it!