#36 - How to Get Lucky
Weak Ties & Fast Flows
How I Built This is a podcast about entrepreneurship. At the end of every episode, host Guy Raz asks guests what role luck played in their success. In a recent episode, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke attributed 90% of his success to luck. Answers aren't always this low.
As Lütke makes clear, luck is a major contributor to outcomes in business and life. Guy Raz aside, luck isn’t something we learn about or talk about enough. That’s what makes Max Gunther’s book How to Get Lucky an interesting read - despite the snake oil salesmen sounding title, it offers insights on luck.
Gunther argues that while you can’t control luck with precision, you can help tilt it in your favor. “Finding the fast flow” is one of his techniques for doing so. This can be broken down into two pieces.
The first is going where the action is. Surround yourself with others. Do things. Network. Move away from the wall and out on to the dance floor. Your chances of catching a lucky break increase proportionally to the number of people that you know. As Gunther notes:
The worst thing you can do is withdraw from the network of friendships and acquaintanceships at home and at work. If you aren’t in the network, nobody is ever going to steer anything your way.
Isolation is the opposite of “finding the fast flow.” Hermits are seldom lucky. So get out there.
The second piece of finding the fast flow is letting people know what you consider a lucky break:
To be singled out as a lucky target, you must make something of yourself known to those who are your primary links in the network. These can still be what we’ve called “weak” links, but they must be at least strong enough so that people know who you are, what work you do, what your interests are, what kinds of rewards you look for in life. It is necessary for them to know what you would consider a lucky break...Your phone starts to ring when you feed the basic facts about yourself into the network.
Let’s say you’re a forensic accountant, but you really love juggling. You juggle at night. You juggle on weekends. While you’re investigating fraud, you’re thinking about juggling. You’d love to do it full time, but don’t know where to start. If no one knows you love juggling, it’s hard for opportunities to come your way. But if people know, they can help open doors.
Let’s say your coworker is having a children’s birthday party and the clown cancels last minute. Now she’s in a bind for entertainment. If she knows you’re a juggler, she can call you. And maybe she’s friends with someone high up at the World Juggling Federation who is also attending the party. This could be your lucky break.
Let people know what you consider a lucky break. Help them help you.
There are thankfully no proofs in How to Get Lucky, but network theory backs up its suggestions. Networks are composed of strong ties and weak ties. Strong ties are close friends and frequent social contacts. Weak ties are casual acquaintances.
Graphically, a strong tie looks like the links between A, C, D, and E below, a tightly-linked group with overlapping relationships:
In contrast, the relationship between A and B is a weak tie. What makes weak ties powerful is that they provide access to new parts of the network and consequently new ideas and new opportunities. In Networks, Crowds, and Markets, Cornell professors David Easleyand Jon Kleinberg note that:
While the tightly-knit group of nodes A, C, D, and E will all tend to be exposed to similar opinions and similar sources of information, A’s link to B offers her access to things she otherwise wouldn’t necessarily hear about.
This is why How to Get Lucky mentions that the best job leads come from acquaintances and not close friends. While your close friends are eager to help, you travel in the same groups and so likely know much of the same information. It’s acquaintances, the weak ties on the edge of your network, that are tapped into entirely new areas.
You probably don’t juggle, but at some point you’ll be looking for a new job. Getting in the fast flow and expanding your network of acquaintances will help here. Catch a few breaks, and maybe you’ll even be on How I Built This one day.
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