Personal Development

Doing and Telling

“It took me…
200+ articles before I got a book deal.
250+ articles before I got major media coverage (NYT).
100+ interviews before my book hit the bestseller list.
You need a lot of shots on goal. Not everything will work, but some of it will.
Keep shooting.” — James Clear

Like the golfer who made an incredible put, and someone said to him: “That was so lucky”. And he answered: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

A few years later, I had a chance to test that approach. During a keynote speech on creativity, I cited evidence that Beethoven and Mozart didn’t have higher hit rates than some of their peers; they generated a larger volume of work, which gave them more shots at greatness.
Think Again, Adam Grant

I once read an article and found an interesting concept there:

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 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 never have 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.

To satisfy my mathematically oriented brain I’ve gone one step further and formalized the concept into the equation L = D * 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. And while I like equations, it’s the graphical representation that really brings the concept home.