Luck isn't random. Richard Wiseman's research shows lucky people spot opportunities and expect positive outcomes. The more you create, share, and prepare, the more randomness becomes inevitable: Naval Ravikant calls this expanding your luck surface area.
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Is luck real? And if it is, how can you attract it into your life? Are you able to engineer luck if it is a real thing? In this video, I'm going to be going over 5 sections that will help you understand luck like you've never understood it before. And more importantly, if you make it to the end, you will learn how you can engineer this quote-unquote luck inside of your very own life. Now the fifth section in this video is one of the most interesting interpretations of luck. I've put a lot of visual charts throughout this to help illustrate what luck really looks like because it's hard to conceptualize it without having a visual representation and just trying to use verbal communication to articulate the intricacies of luck. Now with that being said, let's dive into what we will be talking about in this video. So first you will learn these 3 things. In this video, the first thing is number 1, the psychology, probability, and philosophy behind what people call luck. I call that the 3 Ps to understanding luck. The second thing is why certain people can attract opportunities repeatedly in their lives, which some people would identify those people or those individuals as lucky people. And then third, the most important thing you will learn in this video is how to apply the same mechanisms to your life so that way your success can come a bit more predictable. And by the end, you won't believe in luck anymore. You'll learn how to start engineering it. Now, before we get into the information of this video, I just want you to note I'm on my patio. There's wind chimes, there's a bird feeder, there's wind, and I'm not in my studio. This is something I find very interesting, so I decided to just turn on my camera and tell you what I'm writing about this morning. I use my mornings as reflection periods where I take really abstract thoughts and break them down into writing so that way I can later on make YouTube videos on it. But I figured, why not start now? So let's jump right into it. The first thing is the psychological view. This is what people will call perceived luck. Now, this is the first P in understanding what luck is, because luck begins as a lens. It's not about what happens, it's about what you notice and how you interpret it. This is why two people can experience the same setback. Meanwhile, one person calls it failure and the other person calls it feedback. One person stops, meanwhile the other one adapts. There's a really cool study done by a psychologist. His name is Richard Wiseman. He did the largest study done that was conducted solely on luck, and he had two camps of people. The first camp was identified themselves as the unlucky people, and they had the same exact rules. Before I go into how crazy this experiment is, I'm going to tell you the 3 traits of what lucky people have, which Richard Wiseman was able to filter out after this experiment. The first thing is they notice opportunities while others ignore them. The second is they trust their intuition instead of overthinking, and 3, they expect positive outcomes, which ultimately alters their actions and perceptions. Now let's move into the study because it's very interesting. The instructions were: read this newspaper and count all the photos throughout the newspaper. Here's the catch: on page 2, there was in bold font, "Stop reading, there's 43 photos." What happened is the lucky people immediately stopped reading after page 2. Meanwhile, the unlucky people continued reading throughout the whole thing and continued to give their answers on how many photos they thought was there. Now the fact that they stopped reading on page 2 is not luck, it's awareness bias. Because they perceive themselves as lucky. So this proves the point why our internal focus reveals what the external world shows us. The unlucky people missed the bold font on page 2 or ignored it because they operate through a cautious lens, which now brings me to this chart here. This is the feedback loop of luck, and what it means in this context is that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy at work. Because when you believe you're unlucky, you act cautiously. When you act cautiously, you miss opportunity. When you miss opportunity, it reinforces the belief, and it becomes a cycle, and then it becomes your identity of you being an unlucky person. Now let's flip that. Let's flip it to the lucky character. So the lucky character believes they're lucky, they act confidently, which attracts opportunity, which reinforces the belief that they're lucky, because opportunity is definitely a symptom of being lucky. And then that breeds the self-fulfilling prophecy, which forms their identity as a lucky person. Now let's go on to the second P of what luck is, and this P is probability. I like to call this the mathematical view. From a statistical standpoint, luck is variance, not magic. Life is a probability game. Every decision, every conversation, every upload or investment that you make is a coin toss with hidden odds. If you take a coin and you flip it once, randomness will rule. If you take a coin and you flip it 100 times, patterns will start to appear. That's why gamblers lose and investors win, because volume reveals truth. Thomas J. Watson had the best quote to sum that up. He said, if you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. And in business, Jeff Bezos once said about Amazon, his entire success came from a few bets that massively paid off. But what people don't understand is that they only worked because he made thousands of other smaller bets way before the few that ever paid off. Because luck rewards the one who's still flipping while everyone else stops. Which brings me to the Law of Large Numbers. This chart here represents the Law of Large Numbers, and in this context, the Law of Large Numbers says the more you repeat something, the closer your results return to a true average. One flip equals luck. 100 flips equals skill and consistency. In life and/or in YouTube or any content creation mechanism that you try to put yourself out there with, the more attempts you make, the less luck decides and the more your systems do. That's why consistency turns chaos into data and data into predictability. Repetition doesn't build skill, it filters out randomness. And when we look at this chart, you could see the volatility in just a few coin tosses. From 0 to 20, it's extremely volatile, but when you look at 0 to 100, the average smooths out because volume negates luck. And that brings me to my third point, which is the third P. I call it the philosophical view. The philosophical view, people would call— this is where preparedness meets fate. And I'll open this section with a quote from Seneca: Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. The funny thing is, you probably heard that more famously done by the notorious Conor McGregor. So this Stoic idea reframes luck from superstition to symmetry. You control one half of the equation. Your one half that you can control is preparation. The other one half is controlled by the universe, and that is opportunity. You can't schedule luck, but you could be ready for when it arrives. And there's a really good analogy I made for you to understand luck. So imagine you had a sailboat. The best thing that you could do with the sailboat is is build the sail higher and keep it raised. Because when you have it raised, you could capitalize on the random gusts of wind. This is why preparation will always attract opportunity. But if you don't prepare, you will not be able to execute on the opportunity. So the sailor who has a larger sail, who built his sail larger and keeps it raised higher, will automatically find the lucky wind that pushed him further. That is the same aspect you need to carry out through life. You need to always be prepared, 'cause if you're not, you will never be able to capitalize on the gusts of wind. Which brings me to my third chart. This is the intersection of luck. Everyone knows preparation plus opportunity equals luck. So if we grabbed preparation and we grabbed opportunity and we made them two big circles, the overlap in the middle is where luck exists. Now what happens is if you shrink preparation, that middle zone of luck starts to shrink. This is why the bigger you make your preparation bubble, the larger the opportunity will overlap inside of your preparation. If you shrink any of them, what happens is you're shrinking the chance of luck. So that shows you can 100% dictate how much luck you will experience in your life. And what this means in context is this ties to the Stoic determinism. You can't change fate, but what you can do is be ready for its timing. No preparation equals missed opportunity. Missed opportunity equals wasted preparation. When both collide, that's what luck looks like— that middle zone. Now, for content creation, what this looks like is months of building without having any validation, but creating, uploading, and putting all the stuff out there until the algorithm catches up and rewards you for all that effort. You showing up to make videos, edit them, publish them, make sure that you're following a certain cadence is the preparation of going viral. Chances are you don't just upload one time and just become a viral hit that lasts forever. Most likely, for that to happen, you would have to be making for years to come. Which brings me to the fourth point of luck. This is the modern view of luck, and this is what I call engineered luck. Now, in today's hyper-connected world, you can manufacture luck by expanding your luck surface area, and that term is coined by Naval Ravikant. Once you understand your luck surface area, everything's going to start changing in the way that you operate throughout the world. I will open this section with a quote by Naval. Build your character so opportunity has something to collide with. Every tweet, every video, every interaction is a node of webs inside of your potential collisions with luck. Each one increases your chance of being discovered, shared, or connected with the right person that could cause it to happen for you. That's why the internet isn't oversaturated. In fact, it's under-executed. Most people don't show up long enough for the compounding effect to start working for them because they're not making enough of those nodes inside of the web of your surface area of luck. This is why I always say do more, and I have this chart to help illustrate that, because really, at the end of the day, What luck is, is exposure, skill, and time all, all together. Now, this chart here is the luck equation. When all three of those— exposure, skill, and time— come together, you have that exponential rise, increasing the chances of luck by a significant margin. And what that would look like in content creation is that publishing will be your exposure, refining would be your skill, persisting would be your time, and eventually What people call luck is just the compounded effects of your visibility. Now, the parallel to content creation here is every upload is a coin toss. Every thumbnail, title, or idea is another split test in probability, ultimately increasing your surface area of luck. The creators who get lucky don't stumble upon virality, but rather they design conditions where it had to happen eventually. There's a great quote by Samuel Goldwyn, which says, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." So here are the action steps for you to start creating luck inside of your life. Number 1 is expose your surface area of luck. Post more, meet more, move more, do more. And I'm such a big proponent of doing more, I spray painted inside of my garage. The second thing is you want to improve your preparation, meaning you always need to refine your craft up until opportunity collides with you. So number one, increase your surface area of luck. Number two, improve your preparation. Work as if opportunity is today. Number three, you need to stay in motion. Consistency is converts randomness into results. That's why the 1,000th coin toss is actually skill and consistency. Meanwhile, the single coin toss is dependent on luck. The moment you stop waiting and start iterating, you stop needing luck because you built a machine that attracts it. And now typically I would end the video, but I want to give you something even better than everything else I just said. This is the Law of Engineered Luck. This chart we're looking at is a curve showing preparation, consistency, and opportunity compounding to make results over time. What the Law of Engineered Luck means in this context is that this law unites everything— psychology, probability, and philosophy— into one truth. It's built on compounded probability, where multiple aligned factors create exponential results. Preparation builds capability. Consistency builds data. Opportunity builds timing. And together they film an upward curve where randomness fades and inevitability begins. That's the law of engineered luck. It's not fate, it's designed. And I'll leave you with this quote from my company: at first, luck feels like chaos, but over time, chaos reveals patterns of your Preparation. 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