In 2018, angel investor Naval Ravikant wrote a tweetstorm called, “How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky).” The tweetstorm went viral, and to date, has been retweeted more than forty-five thousand times.
In his book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, author Eric Jorgensen writes about a conversation Ravikant had with a friend, Babak Nivi, about the four ways one gets lucky.
“The first kind of luck is blind luck where one just gets lucky because something completely out of their control happened,” says Ravikant. “This includes fortune, fame, etc.”
“Then, there’s luck through persistence, hard work, and motion.” Ravikant describes this kind of luck as, “running around creating opportunities.” You’re overcoming obstacles, getting your head down, and acting on the vital few activities that matter. You’re generating enough force, hustle, and energy, says Ravikant, for luck to find you.
Next, there’s luck through observation. This kind of luck involves you becoming good at noticing luck if you’re competent in a particular domain. For instance, an entrepreneur is more likely to see and capitalize on an emerging gap in a market than an employee who’s looking to start a side hustle.
“The last kind of luck,” says Ravikant, “is the weirdest, hardest kind, where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you.”
To borrow an example from the book, imagine you’re the best deep-sea diver in the world. If somebody discovers a sunken treasure ship off the coast that they can’t get to, they will likely hire you, the expert, to help.
Ravikant explains,
[Somebody] coming to you to extract [the treasure] and give you half is not blind luck. You created your own luck. You put yourself in a position to capitalize on luck or to attract luck when nobody else created the opportunity for themselves. To get rich without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic. We don’t want to leave it to chance. (Bolding mine.)
While we can’t control the fourth, potentially most lucrative kind of luck, we can influence it by committing to being the best at what we do. The adage is true: the harder we work, the luckier we become.
Footnotes
[1] How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky).
[2] The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgensen.
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