Here is a snippet on ‘luck’.
There’s a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled the exact principle of luck, and the math is wild.
He calls it “phase transitions in human networks.”
When you’re stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you’ve already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.
When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn’t double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.
Luck = f (Surface Area x Movement).
Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described “lucky” and “unlucky” people. The single biggest differentiator wasn’t IQ, education, or family money.
Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.
The “unlucky” group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.
Luck isn’t random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.
In his book Loonshots, Bahcall warns against evaluating performance strictly based on results. He advocates for a systems mindset, which separates luck from actual skill:
- Bad choices can yield good outcomes purely due to a lucky break.
- Exceptional decisions can end in complete failure because of a bad roll of the dice.
- Rather than looking at the final score, leaders must rigorously grade the quality of the decision-making process itself to know if they were actually clever or simply lucky
When organizations innovate, Bahcall advises leaders that they cannot plan breakthroughs; they can only survive long enough to get lucky. Because revolutionary ideas (“loonshots”) look deeply flawed and strange when they are first born, structural design must protect those ideas from internal bureaucracy so that fortunate timing has a chance to rescue them.