The Pursuit of Luck

It is just over a year since  The Pursuit of Luck was named as one of Australia’s top 25 business blogs.  So it’s a good milestone to publish a summary of what The Pursuit of Luck is about.  The book is still coming and I think it will make a great airport book one day.

You get lucky when four elements align.

1. A random collision of life’s interactions presents an opportunity to you.
2. You are prepared to act upon the opportunity that has presented itself.
3. Your character is such that you are empowered and willing to act to exploit the opportunity
4. Your systems and techniques are such that you can exploit opportunities efficiently while mitigating risk

Therefore, The Pursuit of Luck is about:

1. Taking action to interact more with life and forcing more random collisions
2. Acting to change your brain, to change the way you think and to change the way you perceive the world so that you can force more random collisions
3. Acting so you are prepared to efficiently exploit the opportunities that random collisions throw your way
4. Building your character so that you willingly and fearlessly act to exploit opportunities.
5. Acting to develop systems and techniques that create efficiency and risk mitigation

Below, I have set out a checklist divided into the five principles of The Pursuit of Luck.  Like all good checklists it changes all the time.  I add stuff, people write to me with great ideas and I add these too.  So please be sure to visit this checklist again.

Principle #1 – Interact More with Life
To create more random collisions and force more opportunities to present themselves

1. Break your routines
2. Get off the beaten track – explore and bounce off new experiences and people
3. Do odd stuff
4. Hang out with odd people
5. Challenge conventional wisdom
6. Hang around fringe topics
7. Tinker, experiment, practice trial and error – you don’t know what you don’t know.  Adopt the Google 20% “own time”
8. Be inquisitive and curious
9. Don’t play by other people’s rules
10. Don’t be afraid of ideas
11. Publish and share your ideas and thoughts
12. Leverage other peoples thoughts and luck through delegation and decentralization
13. Persistently step up to the plate
14. Just Ask
15. Try Something New for 30 Days (Matt Cutts)
16. Advertise your needs
17. Patiently chip away at the cracks of “boulder-like” opportunities
18. Be Eccentric
19. Ignore what competitors are doing, do something that challenges
20. Don’t do focus groups, your customers don’t know what they don’t know, do something that challenges
21. Avoid excessive positive thinking
22. Never ask / survey conventional wisdom sheep. They don’t know what they don’t know and all bleat the same bleat
23. Train yourself and others around you in art of adaptability and re-invention
24. Re-invent yourself
25. Relax, be cool
26. Learn in the trenches
27. Pursue stretch goals
28. Pursue passionately
29. Avoid people wearing suits and elitists
30. Keep others off balance and spread confusion in your wake
31. Have conversations with people not discussions
32. Create people “collisions”
33. Avoid learning paralysis
34. Never justify or rationalize
35. Be thoughtful of others and the world around you
36. Listen, do lots of listening
37. Embrace simplicity
38. Read, read, read. Read blogs, books, periodicals, magazines in your domain, sector, business type or career type. Read blogs, books, periodicals, magazines not in your domain, sector, business type or career type
39. Train in unrelated fields
40. Poke people in the eye –  challenge their views, beliefs, routines and processes
41. Grab the tiger by the tail –  take on uncomfortable and difficult projects
42. Pursue uncertainty
43. Change your perspective (literally)
44. Take sabbaticals and vacations
45. Put yourself in underdog situations
46. Mix up and vary your working, thinking and brainstorming environment
47. Be yourself, develop a unique personal style,  develop a narrative of yourself that you can leave up to and feel lucky because feeling lucky attracts luck
48. Embrace technology
49. Joke about sometimes
50. Have a healthy disregard for the impossible
51. Be skeptical
52. Avoid premature congratulation
53. Comprise is for politicians and diplomats only
54. Travel
55. Embrace irritation.  Irritation is the prophet of the Innovation God
56. When you look at life’s objects and practices, ask yourself the question “how would this work upside down, or in its opposite form?”
57. Study and apply innovations and technology from sectors that are completely different to yours
58. Hang around situations with scarce resources, scarcity breeds innovation
59. Force random collision innovation by prodding  using random objects, words, images, websites and concepts.
60. Incremental improvement is admirable, but sometimes you need to leap into the uncertain.
61. Listen to your imagination and dreams and embrace other people’s fiction and fantasy.

Principle # 2 – Change Your Brain
To create more random collisions by interacting with life differently
To see more opportunities because you perceive  life differently

1. Adjust your “Think Big Limiter”
2. Learn a second language
3. Write poetry
4. Write a fictional story
5. Learn to play an instrument, or a new instrument
6. Listen to music, as many genres as you can
7. Change your immediate environment
8. Develop thought rapport, eg children, elderly, lazy, generation Y, retires, extreme environmentalists, extreme right wingers, socialists, feminists

Principle # 3- Be Prepared
So you can act rapidly when opportunity strikes

1. Pull weeds
2. Have cash on hand
3. Do all the boring stuff, and before its due to be done

Principle # 4 – Building Your Character Traits
So you are prepared to take the leap into the unknown of opportunity exploitation

1. Raise your self-esteem
2. Eliminate your fear of embarrassment
3. Embrace non-conformity
4. Act Boldly
5. Trust your instincts
6. Enjoy and be proud of failure
7. Have a purpose
8. Thicken Your Skin
9. Develop a “Do Whatever it Takes” attitude
10. Believe in Yourself
11. Commit
12. Never Quit (but know when to quit, see Principle #16)
13. Don’t Get Bitter, Get Successful

Principle # 5- Have Systems and Techniques in Place
So that you quickly leap into exploiting the opportunities with “back of the napkin” plans
So that you mitigate risk

1. The $5 calculator
2. The back of the napkin business plan
3. The two page business plan
4. Talk to potential byers, users, friends and enemies (5 minute phone calls)
5. Avoid analysis paralysis
6. Adopt a “Portfolio Approach”
7. Avoid perfection paralysis
8. Just Do it
9. Complexity is stupid, apply the KISS principle
10. Take hedged risks with downside limits
11. You can break even all day
12. Ask for help
13. Collaborate with others
14. Leverage experts in their field
15. Kill off the living dead
16. Know when to quit
17. Know when to be a committee of one

Other Stuff You Need to Know about the  The Pursuit of Luck Strategy

1. The Three Contact States: Misfortune, Limbo & Opportunity
2. The Leap-Increment Dichotomy
3. The Disorder-System Dichotomy
4. The Quit-Know When to Quit Dichotomy
5. Your perception of luck
6. The 6th “P” of Marketing:  Pursuit of Luck?

Contact the author, Business Consultant, Jason Bresnehan