You make your own luck.
No, really. It's actually kind of true.
Second Act is out in paperback on 22nd May. In the US, it will be out in paperback in October. You can already get it in hardback, kindle, and audio.
Amazon USA | UK | Canada | Australia
In response to some of the whining about some of the new writers joining Substack, wrote on Notes,
I think she’s right; what I want to talk about is this part.
Tons of people grow on merit and talent. The lion’s share of ultra-successful writers got to where they are, in part, by network effects though. A lot of that is just luck.
I want to persuade you that a lot of luck isn’t as lucky as it looks. Before I wrote Second Act, I was a naive believer in luck. I thought a lot of luck was dumb luck to the extent I thought about it at all. When people talked about making your own luck, I assumed they were easy optimists. If you think you have to go out and make your own luck, you are probably lucky enough to be the sort of person who finds it easier to go out. And indeed, there is some evidence for that.
The psychologist Richard Wiseman believes that lucky people are not blessed with better fortune: they make their own luck. Lucky people are more extroverted, engage in more social encounters, have body language that attracts people to talk to them — lucky people smile twice as much as unlucky people – and, most importantly, ‘lucky people are effective at building secure, and long lasting, attachments with the people that they meet’. Unlucky people are significantly more neurotic and much less open to new experiences. One obvious problem with this is that you would expect lucky people to be happier. After all, they got lucky. These are correlational studies.
It’s not great evidence, but it is suggestive that the people who believe in making your own luck don’t realise they won the personality lottery. But the more I learned, the more I came to believe that this is a shallow version of a true idea.
Look at the story of Maya Angelou.
Angelou only realized her ambition to write in her thirties when she was working as a dancer in California. She heard that the writer John Killens was in town and she sent him samples of her work. He advised her to move to New York. There she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, a group that provided support and feedback on her writing. Some years later, her friend the novelist James Baldwin took her to dinner with Jules and Judy Feiffer. Judy Feiffer was a writer and editor. She persuaded Angelou that her incredible life story ought to be turned into a book and introduced her to an editor at Random House. It was in this way that Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her first book, aged forty.
I love this story. By the time her opportunity came along, Angelou was tired. She actually didn’t want to go to the dinner party! The fact that she went, that she got invited, was lucky. The fact that she was in a position to get invited was not lucky; it was the result of years of work.
… that wasn’t random luck: she had spent years in the network, building relationships. And when she got to the dinner, she was able to dazzle with her story. Not everyone gets invitations to parties like that, but you are more likely to get them if you send your work out, take advice, join writers’ groups, and so on.
When you see the details, it doesn’t look like extraversion and networking, it looks like someone pursuing a career long and hard enough to get lucky. The publishers at the party asked her to tell the story of her life. She was so ready for that. Networking and luck aren’t just about making connections: they are about being able to make use of connections.
Angelou didn’t only persist at networking until the right connection was made: she was able to make use of that connection. Although she got started late as a writer, it was through what Wiseman would call her ‘network of luck’ that she got published. We are not all going to become Maya Angelou and make friends with James Baldwin. But if you decline to participate, the world will decline to pay attention. ‘Many complain of neglect who never tried to attract regard,’ said Samuel Johnson.
This isn’t the same as being an extravert. If there’s something you want to do, do it. By doing it, you increase your “surface area of luck”, as Paul Graham says. The idea I most loved discovering was James Austin’s four types of luck, which is all about increasing the surface area of your luck.
In his book Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty, the neurologist James Austin used this to illustrate his theory that ‘exploratory behaviour’ was crucial to finding good luck. Austin describes four sorts of luck.
Luck is the result of exploration. The more you explore, the more you find.
Obviously, one of the four types is “dumb luck”.
First is the pure chance of accident that happens to everyone.
I cannot deny this sort of luck exists, but I can show you it is less important than you think. The other three types of luck are all to do with energy. I will bold the essential sentences.
The second sort of chance involves what Austin calls ‘motion’: you must keep looking if you want to discover something. ‘If the researcher did not move until he was certain of progress he would accomplish very little.’ Austin said that ‘ill-defined, restless, driving’ action has a place in helping to uncover opportunity.
Next is the type of chance that requires the ‘special receptivity’ of the lucky person. This sort of chance, as Louis Pasteur said, favours the prepared mind. This is how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. It is well known that penicillin mould appeared on a Petri dish he neglected to clean. Fleming was prepared to take advantage of this because years earlier he had discovered lysozyme, which also kills bacteria, when a drop of his mucus fell onto a Petri dish. Having discovered a bacteria-killing substance once before, his mind was open to the chance next time.
Finally, Austin describes how we create our own luck through what we do and the sort of people we are. He illustrates this with Benjamin Disraeli’s comment that ‘we make our fortunes, and we call them fate’. The way you act changes the sorts of opportunities you are likely to encounter. Circumstances that would be lucky for one person are not for another. Austin compares this to the way mutations occur in plants. Some plants have rare but helpful genetic mutations that make them better adapted to adverse weather conditions. Only when the weather does get more extreme is the plant’s ability to thrive revealed; without the change, that capability would have remained dormant.
Each of these sorts of luck is contingent. You get lucky this time because of something you already did, something you didn’t do as preparation, but as exploration. Luck is not the result of trying to get lucky; it is the result of being busy, productive, energetic. The more you do, the more opportunities you will find, be able to recognise, or be well suited to. Maya Angelou exhibits all three of these sorts of luck.
As Wiseman says, the lucky are relaxed, not anxious. They don’t spend their life searching for their magic moment. Instead, ‘Lucky people see what is there, rather than trying to find what they want to see. As a result, they are far more receptive to any opportunities that arise naturally.’
If you want to get lucky, get busy.
Second Act is out in paperback on 22nd May. In the US, it will be out in paperback in October. You can already get it in hardback, kindle, and audio.
Amazon USA | UK | Canada | Australia
The way I had this explained to me once, which I have always remembered, is that it is luck, it's rolls of the dice. Some people will hit on their first roll, some on their thousandth, some never will. But -- crucially -- you're the one who controls how many opportunities you have to roll.
This is excellent, start to finish. Reading it, I understood another mistake that some people make. I've noticed that quite a few people who want to write for well-known publications think it's a matter of having an "in", and so are looking for someone to give them that in. And that is, indeed, partly true -- there are certainly people writing for fancy publications who were connected in the right way rather than the absolute best writers on the planet. But what people miss is a lot of the time the connection only does something for you if you already have a body of work to testify to your skill. (For one thing, having proven yourself allows your connection to say genuine positive things about you.) It's probably not going to bring you from no clips to clips in the top places. I've noticed even some writers who had really vertiginous rises to the tops of their careers still wrote in less prestigious places when they started out, they just did so much writing for so many pubs that they were able to work their way up faster than most.