WHEN YOU'RE BUILDING YOUR LIFE

10. How to Make Your Own Luck

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." —Seneca

Dear Kids,

If agency is the power to decide what your circumstances mean, this letter is about its close cousin — the power to bend even luck itself toward you.

I want to start with a moment from a few years ago, because it's the cleanest example I have of what I'm about to tell you. I was in my mid-twenties, fresh out of a job I'd thought would make me happy and didn't, and a friend asked if I wanted to come to a small dinner that night in New York. I was tired. I almost said no. I said yes — not because I had any particular reason to, just because I'd been trying to say yes more, on the theory that nothing interesting had ever happened to me from staying home.

At that dinner I met someone who, six months later, introduced me to someone who became one of the most important people in my professional life. That second introduction led to a project. That project led to a job. That job led to the relationships and the work I'm building now. None of it was planned. None of it shows up on a resume as a strategy. But it traces, in a clean unbroken line, back to a Tuesday night I almost spent on the couch.

If you'd asked me a year later what happened, I'd have shrugged and said I got lucky. But that wasn't quite true, and I want to spend this letter telling you what I think is actually true instead.

The trap of looking up

We live in an attention-seeking society, and you'll spend a lot of your young life looking up. At celebrities. At the kids in your class who seem to have figured out something you haven't. At lists of the most successful, the most rich, the most beautiful — and wondering, sometimes painfully, why the universe didn't deal you the same hand.

I fell into this all the time when I was younger. The jealousy, the insecurity, the why-not-me. It's a deeply unproductive emotion, kids, because it places the entire explanation outside of you. It treats luck like weather — something that happens to you, that you have no role in.

What if I told you that wasn't quite right? What if a lot of what looks like luck is actually something you can practice — something that, over enough years, you can engineer? What if there's a way to live such that if you ran your life a hundred times, in ninety-nine of them you'd come out somewhere you were happy to be?

That's not influencer marketing. It comes mostly from Naval Ravikant, who borrowed from a doctor named James Austin, who broke luck down into four kinds. Once you see them, you can't unsee them — and your job for the rest of your life becomes optimizing across all four.

The first kind — the kind you can't do anything about

This is the dumb, blind, accidental kind. Who your parents were. What country you were born in. The genes you drew. A pandemic that pauses the global economy in the year you graduate. Whether your great-grandfather had the foresight to set up a multi-generational trust hedged against macro risk (for my kids reading this — sadly, no).

There's a Chinese idiom I love about this kind: 天上掉馅饼 — "pancakes falling from the sky." The phrase is usually used to mean don't expect random good things to just fall into your lap. And it's true. This is the type of luck Marcus Aurelius is talking about when he says, "There's never any need to get worked up about things that you cannot control."

Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness was the book that finally beat the romantic version of this out of me. I picked it up sometime during HBS, when I was surrounded by people whose résumés glowed and who were absolutely certain they had earned every step. Taleb's whole project is unmasking how much of what we call skill is actually a sample of one favorable draw — the lucky idiot at the trading desk who never realized his strategy worked only in one regime, the founder who tells a clean story about a path that was 90% noise. The uncomfortable part of the book isn't that other people got lucky. It's the suspicion he plants that you did too, and that your story of yourself has quietly edited out the coin flips. I try to keep that suspicion alive when I'm telling the story of my own twenties. It keeps me honest, and — strangely — humbler about the role of preparation versus the role of the dice.

So for this kind, the best advice is to ignore it. Not in a fatalistic way. In the simple sense that the energy you'd spend wishing for it is energy you're not spending on the three other kinds, which you actually can influence.

One small caveat: keep your eyes open in case it does happen anyway. If you win the lottery, check the numbers. If a girl is flirting with you, please, kids, don't be a dimwit and miss the signs.

The second kind — luck through motion

This is the luck that found me at that dinner in New York. The kind you get by saying yes to things, by being in motion, by allowing more random collisions into your week than your introverted instincts would prefer.

When you move to a new city or start a new job, you get a natural taste of this. The first few months, you're saying yes to everything — every networking event, every friend-of-a-friend dinner, every weird invitation. Because of all that motion, fortuitous interactions multiply. You meet your future partner at a party you almost skipped. You meet your future business partner at a conference you almost didn't register for. Years later, that person will tell you "the universe brought us together," and you'll smile because you know it was actually the simple decision to leave the house.

Naval describes this as "almost like mixing a petri dish and seeing what combines. You generate enough force and hustle and energy that luck will find you."

I'd add one nuance, because I've watched friends overdo this and burn out. Motion-luck is real, but it isn't infinite. You can't say yes to everything forever — past a certain point, it stops being motion and becomes noise. The trick is to be promiscuous with low-cost yeses (a dinner, a coffee, a single introduction) while still ruthlessly protecting your real deep work. Yes is cheap. Time is not.

The third kind — luck through preparation

The third kind is the one Seneca described: luck is when preparation meets opportunity. This is the luck of the prepared mind — where someone happens to mention a problem in passing, and because you've spent the last three years buried in the exact domain that problem lives in, you instantly see the answer that the rest of the room missed.

This is what I think most veteran investors mean when they say they "spot opportunities others can't see." It isn't mystical. It's that they've earned a depth of pattern-recognition in their field that lets them know, the second the pattern shows up, what they're looking at. Naval calls this becoming "very good at spotting luck" — being able to see it from a mile away, because of your depth of knowledge.

The actionable version, kids: pick a small number of things you actually want to be deep in, and go deep enough that you can see things other people can't. At the same time, stay curious enough across domains that you can connect dots between fields. The best opportunities live in the joints — where two fields you understand intersect, and no one else has noticed yet because they only know one.

I came across a related idea in James Clear's Atomic Habits during my first year at HBS, when I was trying to figure out why some of my classmates seemed to make steady, almost boring progress while I was sprinting and stalling in cycles. Clear's claim is structurally simple: a 1% improvement, repeated daily, compounds into roughly a 37x improvement over a year. The math sounds glib until you sit with it. The implication isn't do more. It's build systems so reliable that they keep producing tiny wins on the days you don't feel like producing anything. The reason this matters for luck is that systems are how you create surface area for luck to land on. Motion creates collisions; preparation makes you legible when they happen; a system makes both of those repeatable when you'd rather stay in bed. I now trust systems more than I trust my own willpower, which has, statistically, never deserved my trust.

This is also where mental models come in — Charlie Munger's whole thing. The scaffolding of how the world works, across disciplines, that lets you reason from first principles instead of by analogy. We'll get into that more when I write you about being water.

The fourth kind — luck that finds you

The last kind is the best kind. It's where you've built such a specific, unmistakable version of yourself that opportunities start coming to you specifically — because there's no one else in the world quite shaped the way you are.

Naval has an example I love. Imagine you become the best deep-sea diver in the world — the one person willing to attempt the dives no one else will. Then, by sheer accident, someone finds a sunken treasure ship off a coast somewhere. Their luck just became your luck, because you're the person they have to come to. The treasure being found was blind, dumb, type-one luck. Them having to share half of it with you isn't luck at all — that's the position you've built.

This is the kind of luck that, as Naval says, "eventually starts becoming so deterministic that it stops being luck."

How do you build it? You lean, hard, into what makes you specific. Not into what your industry tells you to look like. Not into what your parents valued. Into the strange, narrow, particular intersection of things that are unmistakably you.

Scott Adams — the guy who created Dilbert — calls this a Skill Stack. It's almost impossible to become the best writer in the world, or the best speaker, or the best founder. But you can be in the top 20% at writing, the top 20% at speaking, the top 20% at understanding a specific niche industry — and at the intersection of all three, the world has roughly one of you. That's where the luck starts finding you.

The Japanese have a similar idea baked into the concept of ikigai — the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what someone will pay you for. Where those four overlap is supposedly your reason for getting up in the morning. I think it's actually a slightly fancier version of the Skill Stack, but the spirit is right: stop optimizing to be a better version of someone who already exists. Optimize to be the only version of you that does.

Sam Altman puts it more bluntly: "Extreme people get extreme results." You can't be normal and expect abnormal results.

How to apply this, today

I don't want this to stay theoretical, so here's what I'd actually do, in order of how much of your young life I'd spend on each.

On the first kind, blind luck — spend nothing. Don't visit the fortune teller, don't get reincarnated. Just keep your eyes open in case good fortune drops in unannounced, and don't poison the soil with negative self-talk, because pessimism is the single best way to miss luck even when it lands right in front of you.

On the second kind, motion-luck — when you're young, be in motion. Go to the events. Introduce yourself. Take the assignment you don't feel ready for. Travel. Move cities at least once. Document what you're doing publicly enough that people on a similar path can find you — the internet is essentially a luck-surface-area machine when you use it that way. Just balance it with deep work, or the motion stops compounding and starts grinding.

On the third kind, preparation-luck — pick the field, go deep, stay curious across other fields. Reflect often. Reread Munger. Ask yourself the question Peter Thiel loves: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? If you can't answer it, you're not deep enough yet.

On the fourth kind, the kind that finds you — be relentlessly, unapologetically yourself. Lean into the parts of your taste and your personality that don't quite fit anywhere. The world is efficient. Everyone has dug through all the obvious places. The unfair advantage of being unmistakably yourself is that no one else, anywhere, can compete with you for that ground.

The argument against this

The honest counterargument is that this whole framework is survivorship-biased. It's easy to construct a story in hindsight where every success was earned by your motion and your preparation, conveniently ignoring the thousand other people who did exactly the same things and didn't get the dinner invitation.

I take that seriously. I think it's true in a narrow sense — no amount of preparation will reliably produce a specific outcome. What it will produce is a distribution. The four-luck practice doesn't promise you the sunken treasure. It just radically shifts the odds of you being the diver they call when one is found.

And honestly — even if I'm wrong about all of it, the worst case is that you spent your young years in motion, learning your craft, and being yourself. That's not a bad outcome. The alternative is a life spent waiting for type-one luck to find you, and dying disappointed when it doesn't.

A last note — you are already lucky

I want to close where I should have started.

If you're reading this from a phone or a laptop, sitting in a room with air conditioning, with the next meal already taken care of — you are, statistically, one of the most fortunate people who has ever lived. Across all of human history, anywhere on the planet. About 13% of people globally still don't have reliable electricity. Roughly 1 in 11 people lives on less than $2.15 a day. Your living standard, by almost every measure, exceeds that of kings and emperors a century ago.

We measure our lives on a hedonic treadmill, and acclimation makes it easier to dwell on what we don't have than to feel gratitude for what we do. It is a strange feature of being human that we tend to register the gift of a thing only when it's been taken from us. We only feel appreciation when something is gone. We only feel longing when love walks out. We only notice the beauty of a life when it's threatened.

The most important news you'll receive in your life will not be the promotion or the funding round. It will be on a quiet Tuesday afternoon — too normal to feel like a turning point — when a family member calls in tears and says there's been an accident, and you need to come now.

There's a line I keep returning to: airports see more sincere kisses than wedding halls; the walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of churches. Read it slowly. Then go look around at what you already have.

So yes, kids — by all means, work the four kinds of luck. Engineer the motion, build the preparation, become unmistakably yourself, and let the world meet you halfway. But underneath all of it, never lose sight of this — just by being here, on this small planet, in this small window of time, the dice already came up in your favor before you ever rolled them.

Best of luck. Which, by the time you understand it, won't really be luck at all.

Love,

Dad