Luck surface area
I referenced Cate Hall's post about agency in the context of poker the other day. But there's much more than poker there, including the notion of "luck surface area." Some notes:
- Cate notes that caring about luck surface area has a skeptical basis. If it were easier to know what meetings would be fruitful, "meet anyone in the domain" wouldn't be as good a strategy. (One of my favorite stories is this one about Arthur Rock: he tracked his investments carefully and calculated that he would have done as well looking only at the quality of the talent and ignoring the actual business pitch.)
- Cate's discussion also suggests that luck-maximizing approaches also maximize for other things: because relevance might be anti-correlated with important kinds of novelty, "I'm courting luck" might also be described as "I'm avoiding over-indexing on either relevance or novelty." What feels like sheer luck might sometimes be effects of getting semirandom inputs in the right bundles (see here and here).
- An underrated way to increase luck surface area is simply to do more things. Time and energy are finite, but even time-constrained people tend to have plenty of choices between doing something and not doing anything. (And, often, low-cost optimizations are available that let you do a bit more of everything.)
- To embrace luck, it helps to be comfortable with variance along at least two dimensions. The more obvious one is that some things will be fruitful and many won't. The less obvious one is that payoffs might come in unexpected, diverse forms. So, if you write on the Internet, you might meet new people, get business opportunities, have strangers send you great book recommendations, and on and on.1
There's a common thread here, which is that thinking in terms of potential luck gives a constructive lens for beliefs that are often true and potentially demotivating ("things are unpredictable;" "this thing I'm trying to get won't itself be enough;" "I don't know exactly what good this will do me").
That said, one reason writing is great is that, if you approach it properly, you get very consistent payoffs in refining your thought, especially in realizing that various half-baked thoughts are actually silly.↩