Hacker News recently had a post about “maximizing luck surface area”. Jason Roberts made a point that seemingly random success that people experience that most people attributes to luck, is really a game of probability.

While most people follow the axiom of doing “good work” by spending years going through school, honing their craft, and then practicing those crafts and skills to perfection at work (cough, programming languages, frameworks, design patterns, algorithms, etc.) Many people neglects the other important pre-requisites to success - letting others know about your work and building up the reputation for network effects.

Speaking from personal experience, I often struggled on balancing doing stuff vs. telling people about the stuff I’ve done at work. I found Jason’s abstraction of a “luck surface area” particularly useful.

When you pour energy into a passion, you develop an expertise and an expertise of any kind is valuable. But quite often that value can actually be magnified by the number people who are made aware of it. The reason is that when people become aware of your expertise, some percentage of them will take action to capture that value, but quite often it will be in a way you would never have predicted. Maybe they’ll want to hire you, or partner with you, or invest in you, or who knows what. But in whatever way it happens, it will be serendipitous.

But 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.

To satisfy my mathematically oriented brain I’ve gone one step further and formalized the concept into the equation L = D * T, where L is luck, D is doing and T is telling. This demonstrates clearly that the more you do and the more people you tell about it, the larger your Luck Surface Area will become. And while I like equations, it’s the graphical representation that really brings the concept home.

This couldn’t be said better - which is why I took it verbatim and placed it here. My personal take away is this - do not go for the singularity case - either 100% focused on doing things, or 100% focused on telling people about things. Neither of these efforts will tend to yield fruitful results.

Instead - try to balance your work. If you are a do-er and tend to just focus on getting things done - take some breaks in this process to recognize the importance of “telling”; heck, maybe even treat the “telling” part of the job as a “chore”, but a necessary “chore” to maximize the impact of your “doing”. Alternatively, for people that are all talk and no-action; maybe the best way to multiply your effectiveness is by doing it yourself to anchor your reality. That way, your messaging and communication will be much more on-point and well received by technical peers or team-members.

Just like Yin and Yang, let there be balance.