Luck doesn't find you, you find it yourself
You get what you want by sticking to one thing and do your best at it.
I'm pretty sure it's not Naval Ravikant who came up with the four kinds of luck.
But I happened to read this excellent book called "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" by Eric Jorgenson. In fact, it’s one of those I would recommend to all my friends.
To give a little bit of context. Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, philosopher, and investor who has captivated the world with his principles for building wealth and creating long-term happiness. He is also a podcaster, who runs Naval Podcast.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection of Naval's wisdom and experience from the last ten years, shared as a curation of his most insightful interviews and poignant reflections.
You see, luck is the element that plays a huge role in the difference between the success and failure that happen in our lives.
Nothing significant will change or happen without hard work, or work, for that matter. You may win the lottery, but you can't rely on it. Your attitude and behavior will change in the course of life. According to Naval, there are four kinds (or ways) of luck that matter to entrepreneurs, or literally, anyone.
Hope luck finds you
Hustle until you stumble into it
Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss
Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
Here are the details about each kind of luck, and how it can affect your chances of professional success.
1. You hope luck finds you ("Blind luck")
"The first kind of luck is blind luck where one gets lucky because something completely out of their control happened. This includes fortune, fate, etc."
Blind luck happens sometimes. But nobody knows when it will happen. It happens by sheer luck or accidental luck.
For example, when you're walking on the pavement on the way home, you find a $100 bill on the ground. You pick it up, and put it in your pocket. The fact that you found the $100 bill happens by complete luck and you'll never know when it will happen again.
You didn't do anything special to influence the luck that happened. You could only be grateful and thankful for the fortune that comes your way.
Takeaway:
Just like playing the lottery, sometimes you win, but most of the time you lose. You can't rely on it. There's really no effort on your part for this luck to happen. You wouldn't give up your job just to play the lottery full-time.
Be grateful when blind luck happens
2. You hustle until you stumble into it ("Fortune favors the bold")
"Then, there's luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion. This is when you're running around creating opportunities. You're generating a lot of energy, you're doing a lot to stir things up. It's almost like mixing a petri dish or mixing a bunch off reagents and seeing what combines. You're just generating enough force, hustle, and energy for luck to find you."
A basic level of action stirs up the pot. You generate a lot of energy and noise. Just by the sheer act of doing something, you're more likely to stumble into luck.
As an entrepreneur, if you happen to pick the right market and enter at the right time, you're likely to stumble onto something significant. But opportunities don't necessarily come to you. You have to generate some sort of motion, or rather momentum in order to uncover the opportunities.
Takeaway:
Try things. Stop analyzing. You hustle because you want to get what you want. Just do it. Be curious about things. Explore the realm of possibilities out there. You're certainly better off missing all your basketball shots than not doing anything. You'll eventually stumble into luck.
Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction. – Harry S. Truman
I've never heard anyone stumbling on something sitting down. – Charles F. Kettering
3. You prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss ("Chances favor the prepared mind")
"A third way is you become very good at spotting luck. If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field, and other people who aren't attuned to it won't notice. So, you become sensitive to luck."
After many years of hard work, you have developed your skills beyond your contemporaries, gained unique knowledge, experiences, and skills. With this luck, an opportunity presents itself, but only you can see it because you can clearly see the gaps now. Others may have seen the same opportunity, but may fail to recognize it because they simply do not know how to comprehend it.
Others call it luck, but you know that it is because of your consistent hard work in your specialism for many years. You were able to put things together and create the fortune that you've long awaited.
Takeaway:
The more you synthesize your learnings and experiences from the past, the better prepared your mind is when you encounter this luck.
Strengthen your critical thinking skills, gain knowledge and experiences in your field so that when opportunities present themselves, you're ready to take advantage of them.
In the field of observation chance favors only the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur
4. You become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true, then an opportunity will seek you out
"The last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind, where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you."
The final form of luck enables you to discover fortune because of your directed motion. To simply put, you build your character in a certain way, and then your character becomes your destiny. Luck becomes destiny.
In the book, Naval Ravikant used an example of a deep-sea diver with a reputation for risky diving expeditions. Imagine being the best deep-sea diver in the world. You've put in the work, hours, blood, sweat and tears into deep-sea diving and now you're known for taking dives that nobody else dare to attempt.
By sheer luck, or luck that happens without doing anything special to influence the luck factor, a person finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast but they can't get to it. Well, their luck became your luck, as they're going to come to you to help them get the treasure, and in return, you're going to get paid for it.
From the deep-sea diver's example, we know that he is an influential, trusted and reliable figure in his field. The person who found the sunken treasure is experiencing blind luck and you're experiencing luck that comes to you naturally because of your constant drive and determination to be the best at what you do.
To get rich without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic. When you become the best at what you do, and no one can do what you do as well, luck will naturally be attracted to you. This way, you create your own luck. You put yourself in a position where luck is attracted to you. We don't want to leave it to chance, just like winning a lottery.
You can’t be normal and expect abnormal results. – Jeffery Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford
Takeaway:
It starts off with the mental mind. Then, you start building your character and reputation so that eventually, wins that come by are no longer luck, but because of the sheer deterministic character that makes you capable of taking advantage of opportunities that others might characterize as luck...but you know deep down it wasn't.
Be eccentric in whatever you do. Being eccentric helps you to find the new and novel. Be willing to dig deeper into things and be very good at it.
Wherever focus goes, energy flows.
Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics. – Albert Einstein
So what does all these lucks mean for you? What can you do and how can you take advantage of them?
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Great read