Synchronicity surface area
Some people have all the luck.
They go to a party and strike up a conversation with someone who turns out to be their ideal partner (and into them too). They find a job with high pay and good hours that happens to match their idiosyncratic skill set-- who knew that some job called for expertise in both horticulture and ethnomusicology? You compliment their new scarf and they say “oh, this thing? I happened across it in a thrift store for fifty cents. It turns out it’s designer!”
Tautologically, you can’t make any specific good luck happen to you. But it’s possible to make it more likely that something lucky will happen to you. I’ve been calling this “synchronicity surface area.”
Obvious caveat: increasing your synchronicity surface area has costs in time, money, and energy. If your life is already great, you might want to concentrate on what you’re already doing, not on making it even better.
So, how do you increase your synchronicity surface area?
Have Slack
Slack is resources without binding constraints about how you should use them:
Unscheduled time.
Unused space in your house.
Friends and acquaintances who owe your favors, or who will help you out out of the kindness of their hearts.
Tools (for home repair, car repair, sewing...).
Savings.
A “fun money” section in your budget.
Energy, both physical and mental.
Emotional resources, lack of stress, “cope.”
How do you know if you have enough slack? I like Raymond Arnold’s heuristic that you should be able to easily handle three surprise problems a week.
Good luck often requires extra resources to take advantage of. It doesn’t matter if you meet the ideal partner if you don’t have time to date them; it doesn’t matter if you have your dream freelancing project if you’re so exhausted that you can’t do anything except binge Netflix; it doesn’t matter if you find a fantastic outfit if you can’t afford to buy it. You need enough slack in your life that, when a good opportunity comes your way, you can grab it.
Be Good
By “be good”, I mean a couple of different things:1
Be competent: do your work well; don’t cut corners; make something you’re proud of.
Be friendly: have a good word for everyone; be kind; welcome new or anxious people; do small favors for people; don’t get in stupid fights.
Be reliable: do what you say you’re going to do; keep your word; clean up your own messes; don’t flake on your obligations.
These match up with the old freelancer saying: “if you want a career as a freelancer, you need to be at least two of good, pleasant to work with, and on time.”2
I hammer repeatedly on this, but being a virtuous person is usually selfishly good for you in the long run. Being genuinely kind and interested in others works much better to make people like you than How To Win Friends And Influence People bullshit. Backstabbing your way up the corporate ladder is nowhere near as good for your career as actually being good at your job.
If you’re flaky and incompetent and mean, the opportunities that pass you by are invisible to you. No one sends you an email to say “we would have hired you, but we heard from your last client that your work was sloppy and they had to spend twice your fee fixing it.” Girls don’t go up to you to say, “I had a crush on you until I saw you call your ex-girlfriend ugly and stupid.” You don’t see the party invitations that quietly don’t get sent, the exciting work projects that quietly go to someone else, the grouphouses that quietly don’t ask you to join them as a housemate. It looks like other people are just lucky.
