Benefitting from fortune: purely rub of the green?
Benefitting from fortune: purely rub of the green?
#68 - learning an instrument 'cause it's free
Hi there,
An online assessment I did this week deemed me to be “extremely inclined to have a positive outlook on the world and future”. Living up to this computer-generated personality of mine…the British weather situation has started to brighten! Getting away with short-sleeved shirts, walking home with my coat off and even some majestic sunshine this afternoon ☀️
Another half term down, half of the year done, I’m looking forward to a relaxing holiday before a dizzyingly busy March and then exams.
Highlight of the week ⭐: has to be performing (and opening!) the Senior Soloists’ Concert at school. Playing my oboe, whose reed (mouthpiece), expectedly, started to misbehave under the spotlight, was a wonderful experience and an enjoyable way to end the half-term.
Learning to play the oboe was an accident. You might even call it pure luck.
I don’t know about you, but back in 2018, I didn’t know of any Year 8 12-year-old kid who checked his school's Twitter page every evening and read the weekly newsletter from top-to-bottom. Apart from me, of course.
This was how I stumbled upon a tweet - in partnership with the Birmingham Music Service, the school was offering free lessons for the “endangered instruments” oboe and bassoon, that too to Year 7.
I asked Mr Buxton, our music director, if I could join1 and thankfully, he said yes. And the rest is history. (Actually, it wasn’t, what followed were months of ‘dying duck’ noises until fairly recently when I learnt how to make a more pleasant sound)
And here I am, over 4 years on, the oboe taking up the #1 spot in my trio, nearing a Grade 6 exam with hopes of a Grade 8 distinction before I dash off to university.
This example shows just how powerful luck can be. An uncontrollable magical phenomenon which can both conjure ‘rags to riches’ stories or, if you get it on its wrong side, dispel you to the deepest of troubles. We’ve all had both sides of the coin dealt to us and with it, we can end up with massive successes or rotten failures.
One brilliant example is brought to you by Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money.
In 1968 there were roughly 303 million high-school-age people in the world[…]and only about 300 of them attended Lakeside School.
Start with 303 million, end with 300. One in a million high-school-age students attended the high school that had the combination of cash and foresight to buy a computer. Bill Gates happened to be one of them.
Bill Gates is now the 4th richest man in the world, after building a trillion-dollar mega-company. Luck wasn’t the only factor in the huge success, of course, but it certainly set off the dominos.
So, we should be wondering: how do we increase our own luck? I know I just said that it is something out of our hands, destined to the hands of fate and circumstance, but turns out you can try to attract luck:
“Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity” - Earl Nightingale, motivational speaker (a nice clip here)
Putting yourself ‘out there’ - the more chances you take, the more opportunities you grasp, the greater the chances of luck finding your way. We never know when fortune may decide to enter our life but it’s more likely to if you say ‘yes’ to stuff - meeting new people, moving countries, attending events. A great example here from Ali Abdaal.
Grabbing opportunities that come your way - sticking with his concepts, I love an idea he shared about window openers vs door knockers. Window openers expect to see the prize before they step in whereas door knockers, although there may not be a surefire immediate return and they may fail, do things to increase their leverage. “Individually, a single one of these might not lead to a 'good' outcome. But overall, the door-knockers increase the surface area for potential positive outcomes.” Working on a variety of projects and engaging in many activities can breed luck.
Creating a ‘serendipity vehicle’ - similar to the first one, David Perell describes this eloquently in an excellent article on serendipity - when fortuitous lucky events happen by chance.
To summarise he recommends starting a blog (hello!), publishing content and maintaining a website, allowing people you would’ve never met to discover you and invent doors for you to open that you hadn’t imagined. This ends up widening your ‘surface area for serendipity’.
The issue is that we can’t predict luck and so, to the religiously rational, it can seem pointless and a poor investment of time to attempt to lure luck. They may even argue that you need to be lucky to be lucky. However, taking opportunities where they come only hedges the probability of something turning out well and along the way, you’re increasing the probability of you being lucky.
To round off, the concept of ‘you create your own luck’ is both a nebulous, intangible idea but also a really exciting thought, especially when a little bit of luck has the potential to be transformative. Therefore, it’s worth thinking about how to stack the decks in our favour to chance upon, and most importantly, make the most of the luck in our life.
Really enjoyed writing that post, been a while since I’ve taken joy from a serendipity vehicle sharing knowledge we all can benefit from.
Book of the week 📖
Gathering momentum with One Up On Wall Street. Hoping to get it done and move on to some fiction.
Podcast of the week🎙️
Always enjoy hearing from Kevin. Since it had been a while since I’d tuned into this top podcast, this week’s show served me well.
Article of the week 📰
A system for studying for 4 hours straight
While this isn’t something I explicitly recommend (from my experience, concentration doesn’t last that long - your productivity and thus effective usage of time falls), the principles in here are certainly worth your attention.
Quote of the week 💬
Take responsibility of your own happiness, never put it in other people's hands. Roy T. Bennett
Wishing you ‘good luck’ in the week ahead
Adi
And this was despite not even knowing what an oboe looked like 😮