Get Lucky

The secret to making your own luck, and how storytelling helps

I have this friend from school.

He was super successful from an early age. Even when we were young he was the guy that got one amazing job, after another amazing job. He was a rock star.

I always thought he was just a lucky guy, and to my regret, I called him out on his luck on a number of occasions.

I’m older and wiser now, and I now know that something else was going on… that luck is not something that happens to you, it’s something you make happen.

Ever heard the phrase?

“You make your own luck.”

I’m sure you have. So I was stoked when I came across someone that had codified this idea.

Jason Roberts, an Entrepreneur/Developer from Pasadena, California, has codified something he calls your Luck Surface Area.

Here’s Jason’s simple idea:

“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 expertise and expertise of any kind is valuable…that value can be magnified by the number of people who are made aware of it.”

Jason goes on:

“..it’s not just the expertise that’s important, the very passion that created the expertise, has value in its own right.”

This is because people want to be excited about things and passion is infectious.

When you do something you’re excited about you will naturally pull others into your orbit. And the more people with whom you share your passion, the more who will be pulled into your orbit.

Then, and this is where Jason’s Luck Surface Area concept really captured my attention, he created a simple mathematical formula and visualized it in a simple graph.

The Formula:

L = D x T (where L is luck, D is doing and T is telling)

In other words the more you do, and the more people you tell about it, the larger your Luck Surface Area will become.

The Graph:

My take away

The Luck Surface Area is a beautifully simple way to understand one of life’s numerous mysteries.

So here I am in my study writing this post. I’m looking at Jason’s formula and graph and wondering how this impacts what we do here at Brandkit….and it whacks me in the face.

One of our manifesto’s foundations:

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

What does that really mean?

Well, it means that if you are a brilliant amazing person, spend all your time doing great work, if you built a great product, create fantastic marketing campaigns, brilliant content and amazing images - but fail to get them in front of people, or prospects:-

• you are NOT communicating,
• you are NOT likely to increase your Luck Surface Area,
• you are NOT likely to be as successful as you might have otherwise been.

So, if we’re going to move the needle on our own Luck Surface Area at all - we need to be making darned sure we’re actually telling our story, actually communicating what we are doing, on a regular basis …and with pictures too (because a story told with visuals is far more interesting and therefore more powerful).

This is where I segway to what we do at Brandkit®, and that is, help you tell your own story (with visuals), more often and at scale, by making it easier to give your many storytellers (such as your marketing team, sales team, employees, partners, customers, suppliers, journalists and others) access to all the content they need to actually tell your story.

Thanks, Jason - we love it (The Luck Surface Area concept) - Check it out here

Your Call to Action

Your call to action is simple.

• Do good work
• Be sure to tell your story
• Make your own luck!

Wishing you much luck and Happy Branding :)