Luck Surface Area, or How To Create Luck.

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the heck of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. Today on the music makers, we're reading a blog post called how to increase Your Luck Surface Area by Jason Roberts. Let's do it. Luck surface area is a turn of phrase that popped out of my mouth during an episode of Tech Zing a few months back and is something I've been meaning to write about ever since but never got around to actually doing. However, thanks to Lance Jones who referenced the concept in a recent blog post, I've finally been spurred into action.

If there's one thing I've discovered in recent years, it's this. The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your luck surface area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about, combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated. It's a simple concept, but an extremely powerful one because what it implies is that you can directly control the amount of luck you receive. In other words, you make your own luck. Here's how it works.

When you pour energy into a passion, you develop an expertise, and an expertise of any kind is valuable. But quite often, that value can actually be magnified by the number of people who are made aware of it. The reason is that when people become aware of your expertise, some percentage of them will take action to capture that value, but quite often, it will be in a way you would have never predicted. Maybe they'll want to hire you or partner with you or invest in you or who knows what. But in whatever way it happens, it will be serendipitous.

But it's not just the expertise that's important. The very passion that created the expertise has value in its own right. This is because people want to be excited about things and passion is infectious. When you do something you're excited about, you will naturally pull others into your orbit. And the more people with whom you share your passion, the more will be pulled into your orbit.

To satisfy my mathematically oriented brain, I've gone one step further and formalized the concept into the equation L equals D times T, where l is luck, d is doing, and t is telling. This demonstrates clearly that the more you do and the more people you tell about it the larger your luck surface area will become. This luxe surface area concept is great. So this isn't totally different from the article we've already looked at called Do Things Tell People. But, what this, what Jason is saying here is that by doing things and telling people you are creating your luxe surface area.

And so what, besides the equation, what is a lux surface area? Well, lux surface area is how likely you are to get lucky. So what what does that mean? How likely are you to get just emailed out of the blue for some cool new job? How likely are you to get a publisher to come to you and say, we love what you do.

We want you to write a book for us. How likely is it that somebody comes to you and says, hey. I'm opening a new business and I want you to do it with me. And so from the outside, people looking in would say, oh man. You're so lucky.

You got your last job. They found you. You didn't have to go look. Or, oh man, they're so lucky, they they had this blog and now they've got a book because a publisher contacted them. Right?

Well, yeah, true, they were lucky, but it's because their luck surface area was huge. In the case of the job, that example was actually real. That one was me. I was trying to build, I was trying to code something and while I was doing it, I was blogging the whole time about the problems I was having and what solutions I was coming up with. And I would put the code out there and I would write a blog post about it.

And, eventually, I got a phone call from a company in California that said, hey, we came across your blog. We're having some of the same issues. It looks like you've figured them out. Do you want to come work for us? And I said, no, but I'll contract for you, and they said, great.

And so, me looking back on it thinks, man, that was super lucky. Yeah. I was lucky, but I was doing all of this stuff. I was, you know, at home working on these projects and running into problems and fixing them. Right?

That's that's not uncommon. People work on projects, People run into problems. People fix them. So that's that's the doing things side of it. But what I did was I wrote blog posts about it and I just, for no apparent reason, other than the fact that I already knew about this lux surface area concept, I was writing blog posts about it because I knew that it would increase my luck surface area.

And it did. They called me and said, do you want to work for me? So then you need to ask yourself 2 questions. What are you doing? And who are you telling?

And if you don't know who you're telling maybe maybe you can ask yourself, how are you telling anyone? So, what are you doing? If you're not doing anything, first of all, I probably don't believe you. I I bet you're doing something. What's your hobby?

What do you like doing? What do you spend time doing on the weekends or after work? And if you are legitimately not doing anything, if if you just come home from work, watch TV and go to bed then you should do more things. So look at it and say what am I doing? Find the thing that you like doing.

Are you building something in the real world or on a computer? Are you writing? Do you enjoy writing? Are you writing regularly? Are you playing music?

Are you super into architecture or furniture or fashion? Whatever it is, you have something. So how are you telling people? Because you should be telling people and not just so you'll get a job. Don't think that this is just so you can find some job.

That's the thing about the luxe surface area is you have no idea what's going to happen, but if your luxe surface area is huge you're going to get lucky. So you should be telling people. You should be, keeping a blog about colonial architecture. It's the Internet. There are tons of people out there who care about colonial architecture.

I'm not one of them, but there are thousands of them out there. So, if you start keeping a blog about the thing that you love, colonial architecture, shoot, Do energy efficiency of colonial architecture. It can be the most obscure thing in the world, but if you are doing it and you love it, you should tell people about it. You should keep a blog. You should start a newsletter.

You should go to meet ups. You should write articles about it. However you choose to tell people, whether that's online or in person, you should tell people. You never know what's gonna happen. And at the end of the day, don't you want to be the person with the blog about energy efficiency of colonial architecture?

How's that not cool? I do not care at all about energy efficiency of colonial architecture. I actually don't even know if that's a thing. But if I met you and said, hey. Oh, so what what do you do?

And you said, well, I am an engineer, but I also have this blog that I keep about energy efficiency of colonial architecture. You know what I'm not gonna ask about? Being an engineer. You know what I am gonna ask about? What the heck is energy efficiency of colonial architecture?

Tell me more. You're so interesting. And you never know. My brother may work for the History Channel, and you may find yourself on the History Channel relatively soon. But even if not, you're that cool guy who's actually doing something.

Good for you. So makers of music, go do something and then tell me about it. Tell everyone about it. If you're already doing something and you're already telling people, tell me. Send me an email.

What are you doing? I want to see it. And until next time keep doing it. You can see the show notes for this episode or leave a comment by going to musicmakers.fm/group. You can subscribe in Itunes by searching for Musicmakers.

And please leave a review by going to musicmakers.fm/review.