Apr 30


This book is fantastic. Here’s the main premise (albeit over-simplified):

Mega successful entrepreneurs consistently cite luck as being one of the most critical factors of their success. This is depressing from an aspiring entrepreneur perspective because it’s disempowering. It means for all the energy we expend to improve our odds of success, our efforts are ultimately trumped by a force that’s out of our control. Thor and Lane posit that while we can’t manufacture luck, we can court it by cultivating the conditions for serendipity.

Suspend all your disbelief for a second and think about the ramifications of this premise. If:
a) luck truly trumps the importance of other factors like productivity, creativity, intelligence, communication, etc. in the success of a venture and
b) there is a framework that can amplify it
Strengthening that “muscle” is the single best exercise we can engage in to help our respective causes.

I tried to think how best to do justice to this book in a review and I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way is via an experiment I’ll call: “A post a day for the month of May.”

It’s a rare gem of a book that takes a counterintuitive premise (ie. “luck can be courted”), offers well-thought & researched ideas, anchors the theory with memorable stories and does it all in a style that’s entertaining and believable. But it’s extremely rare to read a book that lives beyond the paper, compels one to behave differently and generates an immediate noticeable impact.

I’ve struggled with writer’s block over the past few months. Truth be told it’s a problem far larger than writer’s block more on the order of “connective paralysis.” I think we all occasionally find ourselves in life’s “eddies” where the stream of life flows past us while we remain stuck. I’ve had a dry spell of creative energy and connective apathy stuck in one of these eddies for awhile. It’s like having a dirty windshield where you know your view is diminished but you don’t care enough to stop and clean it. I can say though in the ten or so days I’ve been reading through this book it’s had a very real impact already.

I’m not going to attempt to cram all my thoughts on this book in this post but rather leak them out over the course of the next month. I will say that in the span of beginning and finishing this book I landed what I believe will be a pivotal business relationship and I directly attribute it to what was in these pages. Once the ink is dry on that contract I’ll share ;-) And after a four year drought of original music creation, I’ve begun writing some material I’m proud of which I’ll post soon here.

I have no idea if I’ll be able to crank out a quality post per day over the next month given the volume of stuff happening. But I plan to pick a different passage or idea from Get Lucky book each day, explore it, modulate it with my own take and release it back into the ether. I’ve got some of the same hopeful neurons firing now that were firing five years ago when I wrote posts like this one. Thank you Lane and Thor for writing this and challenging the world with a premise that seems patently absurd on the surface and yet could be so life-changing for many.

Oh and in the spirit of this book I’m going to include a unique song “pairing” that hopefully introduces a few readers to new music and captures the essence of each post muiscally. Sooo…. Change your tune: Radical Face – Glory

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