Luck Is Real (And It's Not a Strategy)

We don’t talk about luck much. Not honestly, anyway. The celebrity founder narratives never mention it. The business books downplay it. The influencers selling courses on how to replicate success certainly don’t bring it up. Acknowledging luck doesn’t sell. But anyone who’s actually built something knows: luck played a role. Maybe a big one.

The problem is that luck cuts both ways. Acknowledge it, and you risk thinking it’s all you need—just get lucky and everything works out. Deny it, and you end up with a distorted view of success that leads to arrogance, bad decisions, and disappointment when the world doesn’t cooperate with your brilliance.

The truth is somewhere more interesting. Luck is real, and we can talk about it intelligently without either worshipping it or dismissing it.

The Successful-at-Everything Trap

You’ve met this person. Maybe you’ve been this person.

They succeeded once—maybe spectacularly. And now they think they can succeed at anything. Different industry? No problem. Different skill set required? They’ll figure it out. Domain experience they don’t have? Doesn’t matter. They have the magic touch.

This is what happens when we fail to acknowledge luck.

That first success might have involved genuine skill and effort. It almost certainly did. But it also involved timing. Market conditions. The right people knowing about it at the right moment. Competitors making mistakes. A hundred factors that had nothing to do with the founder’s brilliance.

The founders I know who’ve succeeded multiple times tend to be more humble about luck than the ones who succeeded once. They’ve seen it work both ways. They know that effort and capability matter enormously, but they also know that some things were just lucky.

Luck and the Unexpected

Here’s something interesting about luck: it has a lot in common with “unexpected.”

Think about the best things that have happened to you—in business, in life. How many of them were expected? How many did you plan for, work toward systematically, and achieve exactly as imagined?

My guess: fewer than you’d think.

The best things often come sideways. The customer who found you through an unlikely chain of referrals. The partnership that emerged from a random conversation. The market shift that suddenly made your weird idea valuable. The person you hired who turned out to be transformative in ways you couldn’t have predicted.

This isn’t an argument for passivity. It’s an observation about how success actually unfolds. The path from here to there is rarely the straight line we imagine. Luck—the unexpected—plays a role in almost every success story, even the ones that get told as pure hustle and vision.

Luck Favors the Prepared

But here’s the thing about the unexpected: it doesn’t happen to everyone equally.

There’s an old saying—“luck favors the prepared”—and it’s more true than it sounds. Luck tends to happen to people who are already doing something. Already good at something. Already positioned in a space where lucky things could happen.

The random customer referral only matters if you have something to sell them. The unexpected partnership only materializes if you’re building something worth partnering on. The market shift only helps you if you’ve already built capability that the shift makes valuable.

What Luck Can’t Replace

This is where people get confused.

If luck is real—if even the most successful people needed some luck—then maybe the strategy is to just get lucky. Buy lottery tickets. Chase longshots. Bet on the improbable.

This is backwards.

Luck can’t replace a good plan. It can’t replace capability. It can’t replace interest, discipline, effort. It can’t replace showing up day after day, month after month, year after year, even when nothing seems to be happening.

If you’re counting on luck as your primary strategy, you’re not building a business. You’re gambling. And the house always wins eventually.

The founders who succeed—who really build something—aren’t the ones who got lucky instead of doing the work. They’re the ones who did the work AND got lucky. The luck mattered, but it landed on a foundation that could support it.

Luck as Force Multiplier

Here’s the frame that actually makes sense: luck is a force multiplier.

A force multiplier doesn’t work on its own. It amplifies something that already exists. If you have zero capability, luck multiplies zero. If you have moderate capability, luck can make you look brilliant. If you have exceptional capability, luck can make you legendary.

This reframes the question. Instead of “how do I get lucky?” the question becomes “what am I building that luck could multiply?”

Luck has a compounding effect on the capable. The more you’ve built—skills, reputation, relationships, products—the more ways luck has to find you and amplify what you’re doing.

Positioning for Luck

So how do you position yourself for luck without making luck your strategy?

You do the work anyway. You build capability anyway. You show up anyway. And you do it in ways that increase the surface area for luck to land.

Be visible. Luck can’t find you if nobody knows you exist. The founder who’s out talking to customers, publishing their thinking, building in public—they’re creating more opportunities for lucky things to happen.

Be ready. When an unexpected opportunity appears, can you act on it? Or are you so stretched, so uncommitted, so unfocused that you can’t recognize it or respond to it?

Be resilient. Luck isn’t always good. Bad luck happens too. The founders who survive long enough to encounter good luck are the ones who didn’t let the bad luck take them out.

Play long games. Luck takes time to find you. If you’re optimizing for quick wins, you’re not giving luck enough time to work. The compounding effect only happens if you stay in the game.

Holding Both Ideas

The mature view of luck holds two ideas at once:

Yes, you’ll need some luck. Anyone who succeeds needs some luck. That’s just how uncertain systems work. You can do everything right and still fail because the circumstances didn’t break your way.

And also: luck isn’t what you’re counting on. You’re counting on effort, capability, focus, discipline, persistence. You’re counting on becoming the kind of person and building the kind of thing that luck can amplify.

What This Means for You

If you’re building something, here’s what I think the right relationship with luck looks like:

Acknowledge it. Some of your success, if it comes, will be lucky. Some of your failures, if they come, will be unlucky. This isn’t weakness—it’s realism.

Don’t depend on it. Build something that could work even with average luck. Do the work that positions you regardless of circumstance. Create value that doesn’t require perfect timing.

Increase your exposure to it. Be visible. Be ready. Stay in the game. Create surface area for good things to happen. The longer you persist, the more chances luck has to find you.

And when it does find you—when something breaks your way unexpectedly—be humble about it. The luck that helped you this time might not help you next time. Stay hungry. Stay focused. Keep building.

Because luck amplifies what’s already there. The question isn’t whether you’ll be lucky. The question is whether you’ll have built something worth amplifying.

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Luck is real, but it’s not a strategy. The founders who succeed treat luck as a force multiplier—something that compounds on capability, effort, and persistence. You can’t control whether you get lucky. You can control what luck has to work with when it arrives. Build something worth multiplying.