Lucksmaxxing

Not so long ago, I had this thought: what makes someone successful in life?

Obviously, it’s hard to define what success really is as everyone has a different perspective of what point they need to be at to be considered successful. But in most traditional meanings of success, I think most people would agree that success comes from a combination of skill and luck.

No matter what your framework of success is, skill is definitely a huge factor in determining whether or not you will be successful. That’s why people try to focus on becoming better at what they do; students want better grades, athletes want to get faster and stronger, companies want better resources and brighter ideas.

Luck on the other hand is not talked about as much when discussing success. However, most if not all the time it is an absolutely necessary component. The world is rarely just linear in a way that the most skilled people have the most success. Most of the time you still need a little luck to push you to success.

Once we break down success as a combination of skill and luck, it follows that in order to be successful, you would want to maximize your skill and your luck.

I’d say the main differentiator between skill and luck is that skill is the stuff that you can control whilst luck in the stuff that you can’t control. Hence It’s much more straightforward to think about how one might increase their skills.

But even though I say luck is the stuff that you can’t control, I still believe you can increase your luck factor.

Doing things like taking the initiative, going outside more, or putting yourself out there makes you more likely to get lucky. Conversely, if you stay put and don’t really do anything meaningful, it’s much harder to get lucky that way.

There are many things you can do to increase your luck factor. And even though a high luck factor doesn’t immediately imply that you will be lucky, it does increase your chances.

Once you think about success in this framework, you can see it everywhere. I would like to coin the term lucksmaxxing and skillsmaxxing (a wordplay on the slang “looksmaxxing”) as to describe maximizing your luck and your skill respectively.

In a way, lucksmaxxing perfectly describes my decisions within my university life. I decided in my first year to do cs, math, economics, finance and stats because I don’t know what I want to do (and how the job market will be) after I graduate. That’s lucksmaxxing. I join a bunch of clubs and spend my free time working on random projects. That’s lucksmaxxing. I go to lectures even when most of the class skips it and watches the recordings afterwards. That’s lucksmaxxing.

Looking back, a lot of my success have been through seemingly pure luck. But if I think about it and looked at it closer, I had the necessary skills prepared and was lucksmaxxing through life.