Tinkering to increase your luck surface area
Luck is not evenly distributed; it is "drawn" like a sample from the world's randomness. This can feel unfair—often the draws are external: the parents you have, the country you were born in, the period in human history into which you arrived. We have to approach these samples with stoicism; the events are outside our locus of control (although we can choose how to deal with the cards we are dealt). Warren Buffett described these circumstances as an "Ovarian Lottery"—the initial variables that weren't consciously chosen but that will deeply affect the range of possibilities open to you.
Sometimes, however, you can choose to draw another card from the pile—by going to a party, striking up a conversation, submitting a paper or story, publishing an app. These actions might come up neutral or negative, but they can also result in life-changing opportunities, or lead you down a path that eventually ends in success. By tinkering, by stirring the pot of randomness, we can generate additional luck even if the initial conditions we find ourselves in haven't lent themselves to obvious success.
People often treat luck as entirely external, rare, and centralised. It might be more beneficial to think of it like radiation, or the warmth of the sun. Stepping out from the shade will increase your exposure. Tinkering is one of the mechanisms through which we can seek the rays—you can just try things. Something amazing about tinkering, even with small activities, is that asymmetry and repeated trials do matter. A single large bet samples randomness once, while ten small bets sample it ten times. None of these guarantee success, but they increase the surface area exposed to the warming light.
Tinkering in public increases this sampling even further. It might be scary to put yourself out there, but visible output adds even more randomness into the mix via other agents, all bringing their own radiating glow. You can think of this as leverage: making a bet that keeps your staked capital the same size but increases the scale of a win.
Tinkering in public is not just leverage, but compounding. Your first attempts aren't 0 or 1; they create a path-dependent system where early moves can lead to opportunity later. Any success at all might snowball, opening up new avenues that weren't previously available—a warm introduction, a suggestion of a new opening, a glowing reference. Attempts that don't end in success are not necessarily failures; we can reframe them as an increase in the surface area spread out beneath the sun.
The important constraint is that this only works if you can keep playing. Tinkering increases exposure to randomness, but only when each attempt does not carry a risk of total ruin. Make bets, but don't bet the house most of the time. You don't need to force outcomes or predict which attempt will matter, the important thing is to keep attempting. We want to build a system that remains intact while sampling widely enough that the cards eventually fall our way.
Luck, then, is not chased or deserved or manifested. It is the residue of repeated exposure to situations where it might occur.