Want to increase your luck? Play the Great Online Game
A new take on personal branding and getting lucky
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” — Nassim Taleb
This post is inspired by an excellent article called The Great Online Game, written by Packy McCormick, and several posts on luck written by Naval Ravikant and Marc Andreessen, here and here.
A few years ago, I started writing for 30 minutes every morning. My only goal was to consistently write about things that interest me. I posted my work on Medium to keep myself accountable.
One day I wrote a post on Adult Development (I had read about the concept in a book and decided to dig deeper). Medium shared it on their Facebook page and suddenly it had over 350k views, and I started getting strange emails — emails from people I had never met asking me to join their podcast or consult with them on psychology (I’m not a psychologist, nor have any training, though I sometimes forget this).
A few days later, I got an email from the CEO of a design company asking me to ghost-write a book on design. I ended up writing a few posts and loved it.
What just happened here? How did I go from writing a post on Medium about psychology to getting paid to write about design?
Call it luck, serendipity, chance, whatever you want to call it. *I call it luck here.
To access the most interesting opportunities — the ones that can completely change your life in ways you never imagined — hard work isn’t enough.
You need luck.
Luck opens you up to wacky and wonderful opportunities that you never thought were possible.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was optimizing for luck by doing what Packy calls “Playing the Great Online Game.” Putting myself out there on the internet and reaping the lucky rewards.
In today’s turbulent economy, we could all use a bit more luck. Yet, most of us don’t spend enough time cultivating luck in our day-to-day lives.
By the end of this post, I hope you’re excited to create more luck in your life.
What is luck?
Luck is the creative interaction between:
You need both of these to be lucky. However, I’m assuming that if you’re reading this you’ve already invested heavily in your skills and talent.
So let’s focus on increasing your luck by increasing the number of awesome opportunities in your life.
But not just any awesome opportunities, the goal is to increase the number of awesome opportunities that are a great fit for your skills, interests, and values.
The more awesome “great fit” opportunities you’re exposed to, the luckier you are, and the more awesome your life will be.
So how do you access more of these opportunities?
How to increase your luck — i.e. the quantity and quality of awesome opportunities
Naval Ravikant shares four main ways to increase the number of opportunities in your life. I’m focusing on two (shipping & unique luck). You can read about the rest here.
First, focus on quantity. Increase the number of awesome opportunities that may or may not be a great fit for you.
- Always be shipping — generate luck through motion
“Chance opportunities are a numbers game. The more people and perspectives in your sphere of reference, the more likely good insights and opportunities will combine.” — Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor
Do something. Have a bias for action, or what Seth Godin calls, shipping (to publish and put something out into the world). This isn’t only about shipping work, it’s also about bringing yourself to the world (showing up at the events, etc.).
The goal of shipping is to increase the number of creative interactions between yourself and your work, and the world. The sheer act of shipping‘ stirs up the pot’, and brings in random people and ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations.
And, most importantly, it creates luck momentum and gets you excited to do and create more.
Yet, most people spend too much time thinking about and trying to create something perfect (like the ‘perfect personal brand’), and not enough time getting it out into the world.
- Creating — Doing the work, writing the article, creating the strategy, etc.
- Shipping — Publishing, executing, pressing “Send” or “Submit”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is what I was doing when I started posting on Medium. I was creating a habit of shipping — of writing and publishing stuff. Not perfect stuff that completely embodied who I am and what I believe in — but stuff that interested me. And this stuff ended up exposing me to some wacky and wonderful opportunities that I never thought were possible.
In short, you increase your luck by becoming a shipping machine — being equally comfortable shipping your work as you are creating it. Shipping is a powerful concept. Once you get it and apply it, it will change your life.
Second, increase the quality of these opportunities to ensure they fit your interests, desires, and values.
- Create unique luck (aka personal branding)
If luck through shipping increases the number of opportunities you’re exposed to, unique luck increases the quality of these opportunities.
Unique luck is when luck comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave. It’s the result of cultivating a unique personal brand and sharing it with the world.
Unique luck is closely related to Luck from Motion except that here it’s not just about shipping for shipping sake — it’s not about random motion.
It’s about shipping things that are uniquely you, and that have a distinctive personal flavor. And, even more specifically, ship in areas and domains that you want to be in. This will increase the ‘fit’ of the opportunities you attract.
Now you may be thinking that increasing your ‘unique luck’ sounds a lot like personal branding. That’s because it is. The only difference is the framing.
And framing is everything — especially when it comes to:
- Motivation — it’s about increasing luck
If you’re anything like me, building a personal brand makes you want to die a bit inside. But increasing your (and other people’s) luck, well that feels good. It’s what motivated me to write this piece.
And I hope this new framing will motivate you to share your work with the world.
2. Perfectionism — always be shipping
Most people spend too much time trying to create the perfect personal brand, and not enough time sharing their work with the world.
That’s why the concept of first creating more luck through shipping is so important.
First, focus on increasing your luck by consistently shipping (post articles, finish projects, attend random events). Over time you’ll start finding your authentic voice and personality and generate more unique luck.
Your luck exponentially increases when you consistently ship things that are authentic and valuable.
Increase your luck, play the game
Now that you know a bit about luck, I want to make it easier for you to share yourself and your work with the world. This is where Packy’s post on The Great Online Game really helped me.
Here’s how to play:
1. Realize you’re playing a game
We’re all playing The Great Online Game. The Great Online Game is played concurrently by billions of people, online, as themselves, with real-world consequences.
How well we play determines the rewards we get, online and offline.
And this game is exponential instead of linear. The opportunities are endless.
Basically, if you have any online presence, you’re already playing the game. Might as well get better at it.
2. Score some points — collect free lottery tickets
“[In the Great Online Game] every tweet is a free lottery ticket. That’s a big unlock.”
This is my favorite point. Every new interaction (online and offline) is a free lottery ticket — you never know where it may lead you.
From now on, think about how you can add more luck lottery tickets to your jar every day.
Some examples include:
- Responding to a comment on LinkedIn
- Sharing your desires (new job, new girlfriend, etc.) with a new group of people
- Going to the networking happy hour
Disclaimer: I’m not saying always choose the option that will increase your luck.
I am saying: make more decisions that will increase luck and serendipity in your life. It’s not just about increasing your professional opportunities — luck comes in all forms.
2. Play as yourself
“You can escape competition through authenticity when you realize that no one can compete with you on being you.”
That would have been useless advice pre-internet. Post-internet, you can turn that into a career.” — Naval Ravikant
As Packy writes, in an open world like the internet, the more you signal who you are and what you care about, the more you open yourself up to new possibilities, i.e. increase your luck.
Focus on sharing your unique, weird self with the world.
3. Don’t trip
This is all a game. When in doubt, just do the thing. Leave that comment, post that article, whatever. As Packy writes below, you never know what this can lead to:
Your financial and psychological well-being is at stake, but the downside is limited.
The upside, on the other hand, is infinite.
Good luck to us all!
P.S. I’d love to hear from you — how do you define luck? And what (if anything) are you doing to increase it in your life?
References
The Great Online Game by Packy McCormick
Luck and the Entrepreneur by Marc Andreeson
How to Get Lucky by Naval Ravikant
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Thanks so much for reading!
