Traps for luck

Success stories are usually built around the hero’s effort and character. Luck, starting conditions and help from others make the plot less tidy and so often disappear in the edit.

Yet a result normally comes out of a combination: preparation, action, the structure of opportunities, other people’s decisions and chance.

You cannot order luck to arrive. You can increase the number of places where it can run into you.

For that it helps to:

• make your work visible;
• meet people outside your usual circle;
• send applications;
• try small projects;
• keep a skill ready to use;
• keep a reserve that lets you take an opportunity.

This is not magical “abundance thinking”. Most attempts will still produce nothing much. But a person who turns up nowhere is rarely picked by accident.

Luck favours the prepared for no moral reason. It is simply that the unprepared sometimes do not even recognise what has happened.

Mark Granovetter surveyed people who had recently changed jobs and found that they more often heard about the vacancy not from close friends but from acquaintances they saw rarely. The explanation is dull: close friends walk the same corridors and know roughly the same news, while a distant acquaintance is in another building. A trap for luck is not charm and not a positive attitude but the number of corridors in which you are remembered.

Hence an unwelcome consequence: keeping up weak ties looks like an evening wasted for nothing. Answering an email, dropping in on a professional gathering, staying on decent terms with someone you need nothing from right now — none of it pays off at the moment of doing it, and all of it pays off only in hindsight.