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2026-02-22

Manufacturing your own luck

To hit a home run you have two options: be really good, or swing a billion times until you get lucky. The second one is something you can control.

Two ways to hit a home run

If you want to hit a home run, you basically have two options.

One: you're just really good. Your swing, your timing, your read on the pitch—all of it lines up. You step in and you can actually intend to hit it out. That's skill. Not everyone has it, and it takes a long time to build.

Two: you're not that good yet, but you keep swinging. You try once, twice, a hundred times. Most of the time you miss, or you get a single, or a pop fly. But if you keep showing up and taking at-bats, eventually one of them goes over the fence. You get lucky. Except it's not only luck—it's luck plus volume. You manufactured the conditions for luck by being in the game enough times.

You can manufacture your own luck

The point isn't that skill doesn't matter. It does. The point is that the second path is available to almost everyone. You might not be able to will yourself into being "naturally" great overnight. But you can decide to take more swings. More applications, more conversations, more projects, more iterations. More at-bats.

Luck favors the people who put themselves in front of more opportunities. So if you want more luck, the lever you have is: try more. Show up more. Ship more. The home run might still feel like luck when it happens—but you built the odds by being in the box enough times.