How to get lucky in your career

Most people think “luck” is something that happens to you. I think it is something you can manufacture.

The trick is to treat luck as mathematics: Luck = surface area × probability.

If your surface area is small, meaning you stay in your bubble, do not share your work, and do not meet new people, your chances of “getting lucky” are low. If you increase that surface area, with more interactions, more visible work, and more people knowing what you can do, you multiply the opportunities for something good to happen.

Every major career shift I have had looked random from the outside:

• I joined a VC out of college because a partner at the firm read my articles from my journalism days.

• I joined ByteDance because someone there had seen my work connecting startups across China and the U.S while in VC.

• I pivoted into AI because I was already talking publicly about AI’s impact and experimenting with tools, so when an internal opportunity came up, I was top of mind.

None of these moves happened because I sent a cold résumé into a black hole. They happened because something I had already put into the world reached the right person at the right moment.

A lot of people work hard in silence, hoping their manager, peers, or the market will notice. Sometimes they do. More often, they do not.

You can be quietly brilliant for years and still be invisible to the people who could change your trajectory. I have learned it is not enough to be good; you have to be seen being good.

So, how can you expand your “luck surface area”? Here is what has worked for me, and for people I have watched create their own “luck”:

1. Create in public

   Share what you are learning, building, or thinking about. Even small, unfinished ideas can spark a connection.

2. Talk to people outside your immediate circle

   Many of my best introductions came from “weak ties,” friends of friends, or connections rekindled from sharing content online.

3. Say yes to low-cost, high-surface-area experiments

   Join a panel. Write a short post. Help a founder friend test their product. You never know which one will lead to a door opening.

Luck is not fair, but it is scalable.

I am not pretending the playing field is even. Your starting network, geography, and resources matter. But within whatever constraints you have, you can make the math work better in your favor.

Do not just wait for luck. Engineer it.

The more people who know what you are great at, the more likely one of them will remember you when the right moment comes. And when that moment shows up, it will not feel like luck at all; it will feel inevitable.