Getting Lucky by Naval Ravikant
During my whole school and college life, I was never a very bright kid but I was not average either. I was somewhere in between (maybe more towards average than bright). I always performed well in exams but things rarely interested me. I wanted to do all the things that I saw, so like a kid I kept running after all the bright lights. This made me just average in everything - average grades, average in cricket and basketball, average at painting (yes I tried madhubani art) and so on.
I always stayed average and so I lost a lot of opportunities. Slowly the college ended and all my friends got into good grad schools or jobs. I had nothing. And to my fault I kept cursing at my luck. I thought 'maybe I have a very bad luck' when actually it was skill issue. I kept thinking like this for a long time to be honest.
Thanks to this essay by Naval, I learned that luck does not have to just happen to you but rather you can 'get lucky'. He explains 4 ways to get lucky :
- Blind Luck - This is where something happens due to some uncontrollable factors. You just wait for luck to come find you.
- Luck created by hustle - When you are moving and creating things, that results in opportunities coming your way. You work hard, you apply force to get ahead and create energy and then the luck comes to find you.
- Spotting Luck - This happens when you are an expert in your field. When you are truly skilled you can notice a breakthrough or 'you can smell if someone is cooking' in your field.
- Creating own luck by becoming the best at whatever you do - Naval says this is the hardest kind of luck. You build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you. Basically you create something that is truly your own, you make it unique and authentic and this pulls luck in your direction.
You should become the best in what you do and build your reputation. You have to be reliable, trustworthy, high integrity if you want people to do deals with you. As Nivi put, “In a long-term game, it seems that everybody is making each other rich. And in a short-term game, it seems like everybody is making themselves rich.”
To get rich without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic. As it becomes deterministic the definition of luck itself starts to fall apart. This is how you can be deterministic.
So, just get your head down, work tirelessly to become the best, be reliable, easy to work with, treat people with kindness and do only good things.
From now till the end, this is what I am going to do.