How to engineer luck

Thoughts on becoming a luck engineer.

Here’s an absurd but fun thought experiment: If you had to double your luck in the next six months, what would you do?

My default low agency response is to freeze at this question. We’re told luck is like weather, something that just happens to us.

For 99.9% of human history, the weather was uncontrollable. It simply happened to us. Then we invented air conditioning to escape heat, central heating to survive cold, and refrigeration to preserve food.

The harshest climates often develop the best weather engineers. Dubai has some of the world’s most advanced air conditioning. Oslo has some of the best central heating. Meanwhile, locations like London and Amsterdam become unbearable on a hot summer’s day.

The same pattern appears with engineering luck.

Many of the best luck engineers I know faced significant, uncontrollable bad luck early in life. They had to learn the skill of luck. Meanwhile, people who’ve been given luck their entire lives often never develop luck engineering — they’ve never needed to.

I find it useful to distinguish between luck-luck and skill-luck. Luck-luck is pure randomness, like being born in the right country. Skill-luck is when you help engineer luck, like moving cities to the place that has the best opportunity potential for you.

The question of doubling your luck in the next six months moves your focus from the obvious luck-luck you can’t control, to the non-obvious skill-luck you can engineer.

Here are 12 rules of thumb I’ve seen in skilled luck engineers:

1. Make unscheduled phone calls - Over the last five years, we stopped calling people. We started booking Zoom appointments and sending Calendly links instead. When did you last pick up your phone and dial someone without warning? Scheduled calls lock you into an agenda: “Let’s discuss Q3 projections” or “Can we sync on the deliverables?” Unscheduled calls wander. You ask how someone’s doing, they mention a problem, you riff on a solution—and suddenly you’ve stumbled into an opportunity neither of you planned. Super-agent Ari Emmanuel makes dozens of unscheduled calls every day. His opening line: “Can I help you with anything right now?”

2. Avoid boring people - This has two meanings. Avoid people who bore you. And avoid being the boring person in the room. Interesting people get more luck, not because they’re necessarily smarter, but because they’re memorable. When someone has an opportunity to share, interesting people are the first ones that pop up in their mind.

3. Poker mindset > Roulette mindset - Here’s a ridiculous but useful statement... Playing a game of roulette, thinking it’s poker is better than playing a game of poker, thinking it’s roulette. Assume every game has an element of skill — you’ve just not discovered it yet. When I originally wrote this, I wasn’t aware of the story of Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp, who literally did this. To hack roulette, they built the first-ever wearable computer. The device transmitted information about roulette wheels via a cigarette packet-sized box that they placed in their shoe. Shannon and Thorp would use a toe-operating switch to input data on the ball’s speed and wheel rotation to predict a landing zone. They improved their odds by 44% and outsmarted the house.

4. Luck razor - If stuck with 2 equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line. I used this razor to go for drinks with a stranger rather than watch Netflix. In hindsight, it was the highest ROI decision I’ve ever made.

5. Proactively make introductions - If friend A and friend B can get value from each other, introduce them. It’s a 30-second email for you, and it may change their lives forever. Maybe they will start a company together. Maybe one hires the other. Maybe they fall in love, have three kids and become soul mates. Networks are unique because they don’t divide when you share them -- they multiply. There’s no higher ROI on any other 30-second activity. (Note — do not confuse this with making introductions where only one side gets value from it)

6. Avoid fan relationships - Chasing “successful” people you admire rarely works. You’re fan #967 trying to get their attention. They don’t need more groupies in their lives. They prefer spending time with people who knew them before their success. A better strategy that is also more fulfilling: Find talented peers at your level. Their DMs aren’t crowded. Help them. Collaborate. Celebrate their wins. When they break through in five or ten years, you’ll be one of the people who knew them “back in the day”—and those relationships are worth exponentially more than being fan #967.

7. Get more curious with age - Curiosity is like your joints - it weakens with age. Instead, you want to age like Larry Ellison. If you're over the age of 25, a good rule of thumb is to assume your first thoughts about new trends are wrong. It’s fine to have no opinion on new trends. But if you want to have an opinion, put 20 hours into it first. Talk to people doing it. Try it yourself. Get your hands dirty. You’ll be years ahead of everyone your age.

8. Delete the scoreboard - One piece of advice I find myself still thinking about five years later comes from my friend Shaan Puri: Most people have a relationship scoreboard. My score versus your score. When I do something for you, I get points. When you do something for me, you get points.

This creates two problems. First, most scoreboards stay stuck at 0-0 because both people are waiting for the other to give first. Second, the scoreboard assumes relationships are zero-sum—a fixed pie where if you get a bigger slice, I get less. If the score is 6-5 in their favor, I feel like I’m losing -1, when I’m actually +5.

Luck engineers delete the scoreboard. Give aggressively, give early, give without permission. The pie isn’t fixed—it expands when you give freely. Some people will take advantage of you, but they’ll be a rounding error compared to the incredible relationships you build. And your funeral will be jam-packed.

9. Reverse prison advice - The cliche advice given to new prisoners is to find the biggest person in the prison on your first day, and punch them in the face. The questionable logic is that everyone in the prison now knows you’re not someone to be messed with. (My personal approach would be to wear glasses and become the library guy.) Punching a 6’9, 280 lb psychopath might be terrible advice for prison, but the reverse is useful for increasing your luck in the outside world: Find the most talented people you know and help them as much as you can, permissionlessly. Share their projects, give feedback, and make introductions. Successful people have a special place in their hearts for the people who helped them before anyone else did.

10. Work on your introduction - This could be the least British advice I will ever give. I can hear my ancestors spinning in their graves at the thought of what I’m about to say. In British culture, we’re taught to play down everything that we do. “I just do marketing stuff”. The problem with this is that people you meet don’t understand what you do or how they can help you. When you have a clear introduction that describes what you do: “I create Super Bowl-level commercials for fintech companies on social media”, they can now realise ways they can help you: “Oh, my friend Barry is the marketing director at Amex. Let me introduce you!”. Being a great luck engineer is turning yourself into a simple API that people can connect into.

11. Track luck inputs - Luck is a lagging measure. It often takes years to connect cause and effect, so most don’t bother. You publish an essay in 2022—it brings you an investor in 2025. You make an introduction in 2025 — it brings you an introduction in 2027. The lag makes it hard to motivate yourself to do it because you don’t know when the return will be. My friend Ben Levy solves this by tracking luck inputs: introductions made, people helped, or bets placed. He trusts that if he maintains a high luck input rate, the luck outputs take care of themselves. You can’t control the timing of luck, but you can control the volume of luck inputs you create.

12. Get good at advertising - The ultimate meta-skill. If you can create a persuasive advert or landing page, you can create a persuasive CV or job interview. This is an incredible luck-hack because most people are awful at advertising.

13. Dish out baker’s dozens - A baker’s dozen is when a baker gives someone 13 when they expected 12. It isn’t the 12 that makes bakers’ customers happy — it’s the unexpected +1. Surprise generosity creates loyalty. People remember who exceeded their expectations. They tell others. They come back. They reciprocate. Apply this everywhere: Buy someone a book when they ask for a book recommendation. Ship Thursday when you said Friday. Show up twenty minutes early to help a friend set up an event.

PS. I said I’d give you twelve ideas on the skill of luck; I gave you thirteen. I hope you enjoyed the baker’s dozen. That’s my luck input done for this morning. Have a great day.