How To Create Your Own Luck
And use it to accelerate your career.
Welcome!
Hi this is John with this week’s Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.
If there is a topic you’d like to see covered, please let me know by replying to this email📧
Tip of The Week: Increase Your Luck Surface Area
When I started my career as a software engineer I was lucky enough to get to work on the most interesting project the company had.
Then when that project was done, I moved on to the next, new and very interesting project. Weirdly, when that project was over I moved to a third really interesting project. At this point people around me started commenting on it: “Hey, John, you’re so lucky, you get to work on the best projects and you’re just a junior developer. I wish I could work those projects instead of what I’m doing!”
Fast forward eighteen months, I’ve started my own business and it’s going well. I’ve managed to land a couple of good clients and we’re making a reasonable profit. I start to hear the same thing again: “Hey, John, you’re so lucky, you started a business and a couple of good clients just fell in your lap. I’ve struggled to grow my business for two years and never got such good clients”.
Before that I’d never regarded myself as a lucky person. I still don’t. So what happened?
I believe the answer lies in the idea of a Luck Surface Area, as described by Jason Roberts in 2010. Here’s what he said:
“If there's one thing I've discovered in recent years it's this. The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated. It's a simple concept, but an extremely powerful one because what it implies is that you can directly control the amount of luck you receive. In other words, you make your own luck.
Here's how it works. When you pour energy into a passion, you develop an expertise and an expertise of any kind is valuable. But quite often that value can actually be magnified by the number people who are made aware of it. The reason is that when people become aware of your expertise, some percentage of them will take action to capture that value, but quite often it will be in a way you would never have predicted. Maybe they'll want to hire you, or partner with you, or invest in you, or who knows what. But in whatever way it happens, it will be serendipitous.”
He went one step further and formalised it in the equation:
The point is simply; the more you do and the more people you tell about it, the larger your Luck Surface Area will become. Or If you prefer a graphical representation:
To me this explains why I was “so lucky” and got to work on the interesting projects in my first role as a junior developer and then managed to win some good clients and grow my business. I was making my own luck through a combination of my passion for what I was doing and my constant drive to share what I was learning and doing with others.
I have continued to do this throughout my career.
As I pursued my business I wrote a book, I networked, I wrote for industry journals, I spoke at conferences and presented on entrepreneurship at local chambers of commerce and the University of Bath.
Later, as blogging took off I wrote a blog for 18 months, gaining over one million monthly unique visitors and subsequently being featured in magazines like Mens Fitness, invited to appear in several TV shows and offered a book deal.
Fast forward to 2023 and I started writing again, this time on LinkedIn. I set out to build an audience of software engineers in the hope that it would lead me to a business idea I was passionate about.
As a result of writing on LinkedIn I ended up creating
, I have offered a book deal, offered several lots of sponsorship, offered consulting, been invited to speak at several conferences, and been invited to be a guest on numerous podcasts.I’ve also done a number of collaborations with great people like
and and have more lined up for the future.So I believe you can create your own luck by doing and telling.
So How Can You Get More Lucky?
My advice is build a personal brand. Become known for what you do, by doing it and telling others about what you do, why you do it, how you do it and how you’ve learned to do it.
If that sounds good to you, here’s a simple 6 step plan to create your personal brand:
Determine your goal - why do you want to improve your personal brand?
Identify the relevant audience - who is the audience that you need to build your brand with to reach your goal?
Make yourself interesting to the audience - build your credibility with them.
Identify people you want in your network - who can help you reach more of your audience.
Reach out to people and build relationships - be interested in people and provide them with value.
Keep in touch.
All those steps are the same for in-person and online networking. 5 of the additional things you can do to grow your personal brand are:
Share original content that resonates with your audience.
Engage with your audience.
Comment on other people’s content.
Build a content pipeline.
Level up your copywriting game.
These steps can be applied to LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, Instagram and other social media. I’ve personally focused on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in building a personal brand on LinkedIn and want more detail, I’ve recently launched a course teaching you the process I used to:
✅ Grow my LinkedIn following from 3,000 to 130,000+ in just 12 months (and on to over 182,000 today).
✅ Become the No. 1 ranked ‘IT & Tech’ influencer on LinkedIn in the UK and 34th worldwide.
✅ Generate 40 Million post impressions on LinkedIn.
Want to know more? Then check out my Build Your Personal Brand On LinkedIn course.
Two Other Ways I Can Help You Level Up As A Software Engineer:
I write another newsletter, Coding Challenges that helps you become a better software engineer through coding challenges that build real applications.
I run a YouTube channel sharing advice on software engineering.
This is the first time I've encountered the Luck Surface Area idea. Like all good concepts, its value is in its intuitive simplicity. Many engineers will likely struggle with the 'telling' part - I tend to see it as 'putting out feelers' or 'inviting curiosity' from others rather than anything boastful.
The more you do these things, the easier it becomes.
I learned about the Luck Surface Area concept about four years ago, but I realized I've been using it before. In essence, it comes down to doing more different stuff (not more of the same stuff, IMO) that's somehow aligned with your long-term goals or vision.
Good luck with the launch, John!