Luck Surface Area

I was reading about a very interesting topic called "luck surface area" a few days back. It's a mental model that explains how we can increase our chances of being lucky in life.

According to this model, Luck = (Passionate) Doing x (Effective) Telling. Since our childhood, we have grown up hearing things like, "let your work speak for you". As if talking about our own accomplishments is a bad thing to do. I was reading an article on this topic where the writer discussed how school trains us to do only the work but not to talk about it. We do our homework and give our tests and expect the teacher to reward us. We don't feel the need to talk about how we solved the homework or aced exam because the reward isn't dependent on it. But life doesn't work that way. Success in life is a combination of doing and telling. If we keep our heads down and keep working, there's a high chance we won't even get half of what we deserve. There's nothing wrong in promoting our good work without being an a-hole about it. Most of us feel shy about talking about what we do/what we are good at. This drastically reduces our probability of success because we aren't working hard to reach the right people.

Those of us who are working needs to be better at two things -

Add value. Make the pie bigger for everyone. The doing.

Make noise. Point to how you made that pie bigger. The telling.

Imagine you made the pie bigger but didn't talk about it. There's a high chance people won't know your contribution and see you as a mediocre performer. You just lost an opportunity to reach the right people by not talking about your contribution.

I will end with a quote from Patrick Mckinzei, “It is too easy to hide your lamp under a bushel, to think that you are just going to do the best work possible and you will naturally be rewarded for that. The world is not set up to reward people just for doing great work.”

“There’s an incentive structure around you, there are decision-makers around you who will largely not be apprised of the value you’re creating unless you make it your mission to also apprise them of the value of that.”