How to increase your surface area for luck

99 comments

·July 23, 2025

tibbar

The luckiest thing I ever did was probably burning out, quitting my small-town engineering job, and then, after a few months, getting in at an AI-related SF startup before AI really took off, during that bubble when it was a little easier to get hired in general. That generated such an enormous volume of opportunity, growth, and well-connected friends that it makes my head spin.

Put another way: I had very few opportunities previously, and they weren't too good. I also didn't really have good ideas on how to get ahead. Now, it almost doesn't really matter what I do - every direction is incredible.

I'm not quite sure how to boil down this situation, but I'm not sure that it matches up to the article. My luck surface area is certainly larger now, but it mostly stems from one very well-timed decision, not from intentionally going out to make connections (I still struggle with that.)

esafak

The rising tide lifts all boats. Being great at something unimportant at some place going sideways does you no favors.

godelski

I think there are also some good general lessons to learn for the tons of cases like yours.

First, I want to say that I don't think it was all luck. You put in hard work and you made it. I like the saying "the harder I work, the luckier I get." Luck gets you opportunities, work lets you take advantage of them. I say this first because I don't want anyone to read things as saying "you don't deserve it, you just got lucky". Luck doesn't detract.

  > getting in at an AI-related SF startup before AI really took off

We spend so much time and effort for finding the best candidates. I think if we look at the history of things, this surprisingly doesn't matter as much as we might think. Huge companies have been built by people who on paper don't look the best. Some of these companies also take off by luck, or what we might call "timing." A lot of what matters is how a team or group works together. A lot of what matters is a candidate's potential, rather than where they are right now.[0]

I want to point this out not to say we should just roll the dice on every person that applies for a job. Rather I say this because like most things in life, there's noise. If we forget about the noise, we're going to be less accurate. Randomness is literally a measurement of uncertainty. While we should try to optimize certainty, we are unable to be absolutely certain. So it requires recognizing the noise if you want to be accurate.

I think we often make a mistake by ignoring noise. Or worse, thinking we've removed it. We don't talk about this as computer engineers, but if you talk to any physical engineer (like a mechanical engineer), or even a machinist, all measurements will include tolerances. That's uncertainty, noise. Without tolerances, designs are not good enough to physically make something. And, the machinists will just make some assumption for you, which you gotta roll the dice if they're going to have too small of tolerances, making your part worthless or overdo your tolerances, making you pay far more than the part should cost. I think it applies to us when programming too.

  > My luck surface area is certainly larger now

And I think this is another important part (that can connect to what's been said above). Success gives us more opportunities. Importantly, these compound. Unfortunately, this means luck matters far more earlier on. I think we should recognize this as it plays a huge role when talking about juniors, high schoolers, college graduates, and so on. The difference between two random people starts small, but grows as they progress. If you took the same student and sent them to Standford they'd probably do better than if you sent them to some Cal State. The former is much more likely to give connections and internships while the latter might lead to none, even if the education was exactly the same.

Lastly, I just want to note that Veritasium has a video on luck and success. I think it is worth watching[1]. It's worth pausing the video at points, trying to make predictions about what he will say, and then continuing. Good way to challenge your own biases (or discover them!)

[0] It can be funny when people will spend so much looking for candidates but also say that degrees are worthless. There's probably a lot of these contradicting mindsets we all have (me included).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

guilamu

Good for you, man!

mettamage

Are you up for a chat, for fun and for career?

I started with AI six months ago at work and am feeling kind of lost where to take my career.

My email is in my profile.

markus_zhang

My opinion is success is difficult to copy and luck plays a huge part.

A better way is to observe the people who failed and failed miserably, and learn from their failures. My model of the world is that, for ordinary people, you are going to be exposed to some opportunities to succeed from time to time, but in a random fashion. You only need to catch one or two to be successful. So the key is NOT to maximize your success rate, but to make sure you never fell into a hole you cannot climb back, and prepare for the next opportunity.

But so far I have not seen any serious conference that focuses on failures. Everyone wants to learn from the winners. I’d hold a losers conference if I got the time.

robocat

> A better way is to observe the people who failed and failed miserably, and learn from their failures

I've always wondered about this for startups: failure porn just feels so useful but my suspicion is that it is useless.

There's just too many different ways to fail.

Focusing time and energy on how to avoid failure just seems so wrong. Getting sidetracked. Unmotivated. However I do think one needs the right amount of fear, and one needs to avoid the failure modes for your particular startup and your particular personality.

Surely the right idea is to focus on competing to win.

godelski

   > for ordinary people, you are going to be exposed to some opportunities to succeed from time to time, but in a random fashion

There's a saying I really love

  The harder I work, the luckier I get

The way I interpret this is that by working harder you make yourself able to take advantage of more opportunities that come along. It "increases your surface area of luck", effectively. The opportunities still come at random, but work helps you capitalize on that luck. As a dumb trivial example, let's say you're a recent college graduate just having a drink at a bar. You just happen to talk to the person next to you and they tell you they're working in the space you studied and are hiring. If you didn't go to school, you wouldn't have been able to take advantage of that lucky situation.

I definitely agree that it is important to look at failures and learn from them. There's a large bias for ignoring luck's role in our (or others') success. Sometimes to the point of becoming superstitious, like replicating patterns of successful people that have nothing to do with their success (e.g. their daily routine). But when looking at failure, it is also important to remember Picard[0]

  It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is a weakness, that is life.

Sometimes people fail because they got unlucky. They did all the right things, but at the wrong time. This isn't the answer to all failures, but it is to some. It can be difficult to determine the difference, but just because it didn't work for someone before doesn't mean it won't work this time.

If luck plays a role for success, lack of luck plays a role in failure. With success, we tend to underestimate the role of luck. With failure we tend to overestimate it. In neither case can it be ignored.

[0] https://youtu.be/mr2Jdp4fdD0?t=38

jonfromsf

You might like FailCon. https://thefailcon.com/

Horffupolde

It’s better not to lose than to win. Life is non-Ergodic.

underlipton

I suppose part of the issue is that a lot of people don't really know how they got where they are. You can point to this or that traumatic incident as the watershed moment that made the difference in the wrong direction, but who's to say if that's really it? Maybe it was a completely different missed (or withheld) opportunity that they've completely forgotten, or can't confront because of what it would mean about their behavior or identity or the world we live in.

A conference that could cut through that and get to some real answers would be very valuable. I would call it a "burnout conference" though. It really seems like the terminology has changed recently; people say "loser" less and "burnout" more, perhaps in light of some recognition of:

(1) the seriousness of the circumstances (it's not a game)

(2) the personal nature of everyone's journey (it's not a competition)

(3) the degree to which a lot of this stuff is out of our control

(4) the toll the rat race takes on even the most strident

billy99k

Suceess always seems random, but it really isn't. It involves about as much luck as anything in life.

As an example, if you studied for an exam and did well, was it because you didn't get into a car accident on the way or overslept or got sick when you needed to study? Or because you studied?

I have found that many people want to attribute all success as 'luck' due to their own insecurities.

ponector

Without the luck you'll not be able to get to the exam room. Lucky to not be disabled, to get an education, lucky to enroll the college, etc.

Almost all success is to have enough luck so there is a place for you. To have a place for you in uni, to have an open internship, to have an open position so you can step up the ladder, etc.

audinobs

This is obviously false.

Initial starting conditions are the biggest variable in the chaos of life.

No matter what your success in life, be born in Cambodia in 1970 and it is going to be hugely different.

You are really just repeating the delusional western perspective that completely takes for granted their own initial starting conditions as a given.

swyx

her suggestions

- Operate from a place of genuine curiosity

- Assume you’re always auditioning for a bigger role

- Give before you take

- Air your weirdness

- Host events

- A period of lostness is a part of it

i think some novel points (host events is good, i agree) but also the rest of this is fuzzy and unorganized. you can spend a lot of effort accumulating microlucks but not get anywhere and burn out completely and early.

my version: https://swyx.io/create-luck

basically classic advice is do more x talk more about what you do = surface area

can improve that by pursuing authentic curiosity as TFA suggests

but then i add in an element of strategic thinking - go to where luck is more likely to occur.

dublinben

If everyone is hosting events, who will attend them?

evrimoztamur

We would still be cutting hair even if everybody was a hairdresser.

alexthehurst

How can this be true? If my parents and spouse and friends were all hairdressers, I definitely would never pay for a haircut.

kosmavision

People who haven't read the book I suppose.

TideAd

This would be a great problem to have. Most scenes don't have enough event hosts.

swyx

ai, of course

pessimizer

> https://swyx.io/create-luck

Thanks, really enjoyed this.

smokel

This is related to the exploration–exploitation tradeoff studied in reinforcement learning [1], for which no universally optimal solution is known. This article suggests to explore more, but it might be wise to exploit your knowledge and be somewhat risk-averse every now and then as well.

Also, there is a difference between making decisions at the individual level and looking at the actions of all humans combined. A strategy that is sub-optimal for most individuals can still yield positive outcomes at the societal level. For example, it is fortunate that many people go into research, even though it is highly unlikely for an individual to find a massive breakthrough.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...

chrisweekly

I learned about "explore vs exploit" in a fantastic book titled "Algorithms to Live By - What computer science can teach is about human decision-making" [subtitle from memory]

Highly recommended!

godelski

  >  the exploration–exploitation tradeoff ... for which no universally optimal solution is known

I want to nitpick a bit. It may be nuanced, but I think it makes a significant difference.

Exploration-exploitation is about a class of algorithms[0], and I would not say that means "there is no optimal solution." Rather, it is often applied to problems where there is no optimal solution. You can apply it to problems with known optimal solutions and it should still get you to the optima.

What problems don't have global optima? Most. Most problems we simplify in ways that will contain an optima, but it is best to remember the assumptions made and if they appropriately apply. This is part of why always maintaining at least some exploration can be a highly successful strategy. Extremely useful in the real world too as the environment is always changing. You cannot generate globally optimal solutions for dynamic problems where the future states are unknown.

[0] Examples include Q-Learning, Bandits, or sampling algorithms. Multiarmed bandits and Thompson Sampling are mentioned in the wiki but note that there are more bandit algorithms and more sampling algorithms.

smokel

Agree. I think it safe to say that we haven't found an optimal solution for the problem discussed in the article.

It's not even clear what the reward function should look like, so perhaps the comparison with reinforcement learning is not a productive one. Life combines both evolution and learning, and it's all rather complicated to say something sensible about it.

adamgordonbell

“Air your weirdness” is great advice. It’s framed here as “start a blog,” which can feel trite, but the larger point is powerful: don’t hide what makes you different.

I spent years smoothing out my quirks until I realized those quirks are what people find compelling. Ironically, aspiring influencers sometimes fake eccentricity. Think “Liver King”, when genuine oddity is far more interesting.

paulryanrogers

Liver King doesn't seem to offer a lot of usable and positive lessons. Being weird and toxic is a well trodden path.

null

[deleted]

sschnei8

Another great way to increase your surface area for luck is being born in a first world country with access to a computer. I hear that has a good success rate!

yen223

As a person who was born in a third-world country, it's amazing (and a bit lucky for me) how many first-world folks can manage to squander this opportunity!

audinobs

The irony to me is I am the opposite of the kid that got a computer in the 80s and learn to program on my own.

My parents were able to afford a $5k inflation adjusted Appl 2E and I never used it. I played a few games a few times but it mostly collected dust.

When we got the internet in the 90s, I mostly looked up what I could get high from and porn.

Then I spent a good decade drinking too much beer.

I blew every chance I had when I was young and have still done pretty well simply from being born at the right place at the right time.

I wasn't born with a lottery ticket, I was born playing a game of craps with weighted dice in my favor and was allowed to roll until I started winning.

We live in a society though of insecure douchebags with no self awareness to really gain perspective on how they won the powerball lottery of existence in terms of their time and place of birth. Make up fictional narratives on their own personal genius and "how you can too!".

kulahan

Being lucky once does not make you lucky later

gcheong

No, but it can set the stage for being lucky later on. Warren Buffet calls it winning the ovarian lottery.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/warren-buffett-says-the-key-...

null

[deleted]

kulahan

Well no, because again, luck is just about seizing opportunities, so it’s all relative. Someone lucky in America may not fare well in Cambodia and vice-versa.

ipaddr

Or being born to a King with great riches.

wrp

Many years ago, like maybe in the 1920s, the randomness of success in life was the focus of popular interest sufficiently to inspire scholarly research. I think it was mostly history professors who collected case studies of "lucky" people and tried to find patterns. I don't know how many publications resulted, but I read two or three books.

The books generally provided lists of observed patterns, usually at least a half dozen but sometimes a few times that. My takeaway from that reading was three general principles.

1. Location: The kind of events that you would consider relevant luck are not evenly distributed geographically. You need to be where they happen more often.

2. Preparation: At those locations, there will probably be multiple candidates waiting to take advantage of an opportunity. You need to aim to be the best candidate.

3. Flexibility: Your expectations for desirable opportunities have been molded by your limited knowledge of the world. You need to be ready to pursue opportunities that weren't exactly what you had in mind but may turn out to be just as satisfying.

TFA is hard to comment on because it feels like a rough draft. The reasoning could be sharpened. I have reservations about the "air your weirdness", because it seems to contradict the principle of flexibility.

csa

For the curious, “luck surface area” was coined/popularized by Jason Roberts from the Techzing and Tropical MBA podcasts.

Our own patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) also helped propagate the concept.

The basic equation is L = D * T — that is, luck surface area equals doing times telling.

I think the author strays from the original concept a bit. She’s not necessarily wrong, but I get a sense of focusing on style over substance in most of her examples as compared to the original concept.

caitlinshall

Oh my gosh, I have spent HOURS trying track down the original source of the term, thanks so much for sharing it.

csa

Hi Cate,

Welcome to HN!

A few things:

1. Thank you for writing the book and providing the excerpt.

2. Here is a link to the original blog post by Jason: https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

3. I imagine that Jason would be happy to talk to you if you contact him and tell him what you’re doing. He goes by jayro here on HN, but I am not sure how active he is on HN these days.

3. I think there were at least two main issues that LSA tried to address. One was capable tech people who were not finding work opportunities that were commensurate with their skill. Another was about the benefits of building in public. Which leads to…

4. Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN) built and sold two businesses publicly (Bingo Card Creator and Appointment Reminder). He was a big proponent of building publicly as a way to increase luck surface area, and I think that the strategy worked well for him. He also wrote a truckload on various sites including but not limited to HN. I imagine he would also be open to talking to you if you reach out

5. To provide some more constructive commentary about your excerpt, I get the sense that each of the headings are mostly byproducts of increasing LSA — namely, be passionate about something and talk to people about it. If you do that, then it’s easy to operate from a place of genuine curiosity, you will naturally (without trying) be auditioning for a bigger role, you will be giving before you take, and you will be airing your weirdness (although it’s probably not weird). Hosting events (overly specific) and a period of lostness (talking to the wrong audience?) just seem extremely peripheral to me in the discussion of LSA.

Anyway, thank you again for posting your excerpt. Best of luck!