Hey everyone, welcome back to this channel.
I've actually postponed the original video that was meant to go out today because I wanted to post something completely in real time.
I've had one of those weeks where everything has just seemed to go right.
I got an email about a collaboration that I'd been hoping for.
I bumped into someone at a coffee shop who introduced me to someone else, who ended up becoming a very key business contact and randomly discovered a solution to a problem that I had been stuck on for months.
And it felt like pure luck and coincidence.
But here's the thing that got me thinking.
In the past year, I've had more of these lucky moments than in the previous 10 years combined.
And I started wondering, is this actually luck?
Or is there something else going on?
So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole.
Research papers books podcasts, conversations with people who seem to have good things always happening to them.
And what I've discovered has changed how I think about luck.
It turns out there are specific research backed ways to make good things more likely to happen to you.
It's not about positive thinking or manifesting.
It's about understanding how opportunity actually works and then positioning yourself to catch it when it shows up.
And so I thought it'd be interesting to make this video sharing the five strategies that I think are the most important and have the biggest impact on creating your own luck, whether you want better career opportunities, stronger relationships or just more of those amazing coincidences that Make life feel a bit magical.
So the first one I wanted to share is applying the law of reciprocity.
Four years ago I had this mindset that if I shared my knowledge or if I helped someone else succeed, I would somehow feel or I would somehow fall behind.
So I remember keeping a lot of things to myself my ideas, my strategies, even basic advice that I could just share for free.
And guess what?
Hardly anything came back to me.
Then I started applying the law of reciprocity.
I started giving a lot more without expecting anything back.
If my friends started a business, I'd buy from them.
I'd leave a review or share it on my social media.
If someone asked for advice, I'd happily share what I knew.
If there was an opportunity that came up that wasn't right for me, I'd pass it on to someone who I thought it might be good for.
And very quickly, I found that The same thing started to come back to me almost like in full circle.
People would connect me with the right person, give me advice that has changed the trajectory of my career, or mention my name for an opportunity.
Sometimes this happened via the person who I helped, as we tend to have this natural obligation or feel like we want to give back.
But other times it came from someone completely else, someone completely different, someone who...
I've never helped, never shared anything with, and it kind of felt like this movement or this circle of energy.
And here's the really important thing with the law of reciprocity, when I was reading up on it and understanding it a bit more,
You can't game the system.
So real reciprocity means giving or helping without any expectation of getting anything back.
You're not helping someone and then keeping score and thinking okay, I need to get them to pay me for that or I'll make sure I get that value back in another way.
Because what you're kind of doing is making a transactional energy.
You just want to throw good energy out there and let it circle back through unexpected channels.
From the outside.
When something happens to you, or you just happen to be in the right place at the right time, it may look like it's just luck.
But when you trace it back, often you'll find elements of the law of reciprocity doing what it does best in this entire process.
And actually I want to hear your view on this, because some people say you shouldn't share things that you know you don't know who's out there to get you.
And other people say, yeah, you just give and you will eventually get back.
So I want to hear what you think about this.
What's your view on it?
The second thing that I found to be really important is to be really open-minded and keep your weak ties alive.
There's this famous study done by Mark Granovetter called The Strength of Weak Ties.
He found that...
Big opportunities very rarely come from your closest friends.
They come from acquaintances.
He found that people are more likely to land jobs and career opportunities through loose circles rather than their direct inner circle.
And this is because your close friends move in the same world that you do.
They know the same people, the same information.
They think the same way often, the same opportunities.
But acquaintances tend to live in completely different circles.
They see things that you don't.
And that's where this luck or good things happening comes in.
Like 99 of the invites, the introductions, The breakthroughs that I've had have actually come through someone I only spoke to every now and then or crossed paths with just once.
If you want to increase your area of luck, don't just stick to the people you know.
Keep your weak ties alive.
But and this is important actually it can also lead to the third point which I'm about to talk about, and that is the opportunities.
Can't find you though, if you are invisible.
So you have to showcase your work.
There is something called the spotlight effect, which is that we think other people are paying more attention to us than they actually are.
We think everyone notices what work they're doing.
We think that they all know about our work.
We think that they've seen the projects that we've been working on and that we've posted online.
But honestly, hardly anyone's watching.
Everyone's so focused on their own life.
The spotlight is on them and your spotlight is on you.
This is why visibility is such a multiplier for luck.
The more you share what you're doing, even if it's not polished, even if it's a work in progress, the more chances you create for the right person to see it at the right time.
This has played a really, really big role in my life, as I've gone from someone who's Initially whose work was only seen by my immediate team and my boss and my boss's boss and a few other people from other teams, to someone whose work is pretty much seen across hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
But the difference is being able to share it more visibly.
All it takes is potentially sharing what you're doing on LinkedIn, mentioning the project that you've hosted and that you've done, mentioning it when talking to someone, saying what wins you've had, obviously in a way that isn't boasting to the wrong person, who actually just doesn't care, but more of a way of letting the right person know what you're up to.
And the fourth thing that I have here, which I believe is a huge, huge factor in marketing opportunities and good things happening to you.
And that is being someone that other people can trust.
If you're throwing someone else under the bus for your gain, if you're sharing business or gossip about someone else's life that isn't yours to share, if you're someone who says you'll do something, but when it comes to it you'll always kind of find an excuse or gatekeep.
None of that builds the kind of reputation that makes people want to bet on you or that makes people want to help you or that makes people want to work with you.
Luck often flows through people.
And if people trust you, they're more likely to think of you when good things come their way.
They'll mention your name in rooms you're not in.
They'll pass along opportunities, maybe even before they're public.
You can be the smartest, most brilliant person in a room, but if you are known to be someone who throws other people in the bus or isn't able to work in a team or is always doing things for their own gain, chances are eventually you are going to be capped with how far you could go, because you can't go very far alone.
You go a lot further with doing it with people or having people around you.
And the fifth thing that I have here, and this is arguably the most important, and that is take more shots and increase variability of said shots.
One of the simplest ways to make good things more likely to happen to you is by taking more shots.
Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness talks about something called positive optionality.
The idea is that every time you try something new, you give yourself exposure to potential upside that you couldn't have predicted.
The mistake most people make is they put all their energy into one narrow lane.
If that one thing doesn't break through, they just assume that they're unlucky or that good things don't happen to them.
But luck doesn't really work like that.
It comes from giving yourself multiple chances to be in the right place at the right time.
So, if you think about it, if you only ever go to the same place, talk to the same people and work on the same projects, you've capped the number of opportunities that can reach you.
But if you're pitching an idea to this person, starting a small side project here and showing your work, saying yes to an event or striking up a conversation with someone completely new, you multiply the ways luck can find you.
And the people who seem lucky are usually just the ones who tried the most things.
Most of the shots don't land, but the few that do have made all the difference.
So these are some of the ways that I found have increased the chance of good things happening to me.
I have weeks where everything goes completely wrong and weeks where things go right.
And I usually find the weeks that things do go right.
The things that have happened have tied back into one of these five things.
And so I wanted to wrap up this video with an action point.
For the next week, look for one way to help someone each day without expecting anything back.
Whether it's sharing a resource, making an introduction, offering some advice, celebrating someone else's win on social media.
And just notice A, how it feels and B, over the next couple of weeks, what happens in your own life.
In a world where everyone's focused on what they can get, being the person who gives freely isn't just refreshing, it's also very, very powerful.
It's a bit of a different video.
It's not my usual personal finance videos or self-development videos, but I thought it was interesting.
And I really do believe that If you apply some of these things to your own life, it can really change the amount of good things that happen to you.
If this video shifted how you think about success, feel free to share it with someone who might need to hear it.
Thank you so much for watching.
Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you for my standard personal finance videos next week.
