Creating your own luck

Missed last edition? — catch up on the archive here

Hey Reader,

Last week my wife found a channel on YouTube TV that plays nothing but Shark Tank reruns.

It's literally 24/7 Mr. Wonderful on a loop grilling people.

Last night it was the sponge guy.

You know the “Scrub Daddy” - a smiley face shaped sponge? Well it ended up being one of the biggest deals in the show’s history.

For a sponge.

Lucky break, right?

Not exactly.

Today I want to share a few ideas around manufacturing your own luck.

The kind where people look at you and say things like:

“it always works out for you”
“wow! crazy opportunity”
“must be nice”

I’ve been fortunate to get my fair share of lucky breaks:

from drumming for one of my favorite bands
to getting “lucky” on youtube with nearly 2M subs
or “lucky” investments I’ve had

Here's where people hit you with:

“the harder I work, the luckier I get” bit and go into a motivational rant about effort.

Not a bad philosophy.

But it’s half true.

Provoked Luck

I’ve been reading this book by Nir Eyal called “Beyond Belief”

In there, Nir writes about a study about luck:

Richard Wiseman is a psychologist who spent a decade figuring out why some people feel lucky and others feel unlucky.

His main finding was lucky people don’t get more lucky breaks… they just notice more of them.

In one study, he had people read a newspaper and asked them to count the photos in it.

Halfway through was a giant ad that read:

“STOP COUNTING. There are 43 photos in this paper.”

A few pages later there was another message:

“Tell the experimenter you saw this and win $250.”

The people who labeled themselves ‘unlucky’ blew right past both. They were so focused on counting the exact number of photos, that they had filtered out everything that wasn’t the assigned task.

The self-described ‘lucky’ ones were far more likely to spot the ads and cash in.

Turns out they weren’t actually luckier, they were just more open to it.

Your Move

Which brings me back to sponge guy.

He wasn’t luckier than the rest of us. We all have the annoying sponge. He was the person who saw something in it.

And that’s why people love Shark Tank. Hundreds of pitches (a lot of them from people in way rougher spots than you or me) each one built around an everyday problem.

But our dopamine-obsessed world keeps us distracted in newspaper mode: head down, counting photos, doing the task exactly right, skipping past the obvious $250.

Sure, there are other factors that influence luck like:

embracing rejection
increasing your at bats
persistence & effort

But at the core, lucky people just see opportunities others miss.

I'll give you a personal example.

Back in 2015 I had an idea to make a video about journaling. But I kept shooting it down.

“Journaling? Nah, too boring. Nobody’s gonna watch that…”

Then one day I made it anyway.

It became my first big video getting over 300k+ views.

It inspired me to create my first product, My Best Journal, which is what funded me to go all in on YouTube.

The start of my career was sitting right in front of my face. A habit I had been doing every morning for years.

I almost skipped right past it.

In your life, this goes way beyond business.

Your "luck" could come in the form of:

The same book or idea that keeps showing up
The person who mentions they’re hiring for exactly what you do
The invite you keep turning down
The hobby you dropped

Any one of them could change your life.

But only if you don't just turn the page.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with this week:

What have you been complaining about long enough that you’ve stopped actually seeing it?

That’s usually where your sponge is.

Welcome new readers!

Lots of you came in from my recent video around self-sabotage that just hit over 1M views. So if that’s you, welcome!

This is my (almost) weekly newsletter where I talk about big ideas worth sharing. Some weeks it’s a quick personal story, other times it’s a deeper dive into one topic.

You can find all previous editions on the archive here.

YouTube’s the main priority, but my goal is two newsletters a month for the foreseeable future.

My latest video

How can you get addicted to doing hard things in our modern brain-rot dopamine culture? Here’s a chart video where I break down 3 problems and 3 solutions to that question.