How Can We Maximize Our Luck?
An old blog post from Netscape founder and now venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has recently resurfaced on Twitter. It’s about luck, specifically as it’s based on the four types of Chance from the book Chase, Chance, and Creativity by neurologist and philosopher Dr. James Austin. The entire post is really worth a read, but this was the basic synopsis from the book:
Chance I is completely impersonal; you can’t influence it.
Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.
Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations.
Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.
Andreessen emphasized what it entails for the entrepreneurial and creative mind, and boiled it down to four questions:
How energetic are we?
How curious are we?
How flexible and aggressive are we at synthesizing?
How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view—a personal approach — a personal set of “eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors” that will uniquely prepare us to create?
In summary:
- We have to constantly be in a state of motion as it opens us to more possibilities than remaining stagnant.
- We must maintain a natural curiosity and be willing to experiment and explore.
- We have to be aggressive at both our quantity and quality of output, combining knowledge and experiences together to create something new and/or arrive at original insights.
- And perhaps most importantly, we have to hone our individualities and develop a frame of the world that is deeply personal, for this is how opportunities that are unique and tailored to who we are can show up in our lives.
By adhering to these values, it’s not so much that we find luck, but more so, that luck finds us.