Surface Area of Luck

Luck plays an instrumental role in all of our lives. If there’s anything I took away from Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, it’s that we not only underestimate the role of luck, but we systematically fail to attribute any success to luck. 

When I succeed, it’s because of skill. When I fail, it’s because of bad luck.

Disentangling skill from luck is difficult. 

There are many skilled educators trying to solve this problem. These include Michael Mauboussin, Annie Duke, and Nassim Taleb.

Jason Roberts wrote a blog post on Luck Surface Area. He describes it as “ directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.” 

The two axes are Doing and Telling. “Doing” means learning, acquiring expertise, and creating various works. “Telling” means sharing your expertise, work, and passion with people. 

Think back to geometry class. You’ll remember that to calculate surface area of a rectangle, you simply multiply length by width. So if I have X for Doing and Y for Telling, surface area is XY. By doubling both of them, my surface area of luck goes from XY to 2X*2Y = 4XY. 

Doubling the output of both axes is certainly easier than quadrupling the output of just one. This is the reasoning behind combining expertise in several domains. People who combine football playing, scouting, and analytical knowledge don’t need to be the foremost expert in any single area. Instead, they’re the expert when it comes to their unique combination of skills. 

Tomorrow we’ll look at how this applies to building in public.