Are You Still Lucky?

Twenty years ago, I wrote that luck isn’t something that happens to you. It’s a skill — the ability to notice opportunities others walk past, and the willingness to act on them. I still believe that.

But I was describing only half the picture.

The other half is the orchard you’re standing in. Whether the branches hang low enough to reach. Whether anyone showed you this orchard exists.

The original argument, briefly

Consider two people in the same company, same role. One reads widely, talks to people outside their department, pays attention to adjacent industries. The other keeps their head down and does good work. When a new market opens up, the first person sees it. The second doesn’t.

That was my argument. Luck is attention plus action. And it’s real — I’ve watched it play out hundreds of times.

But notice what I took for granted: both people are in the same company, same role. They both have jobs. They both have time to read. They both have access to the same information. The playing field was level before the game even started.

What happens when it isn’t?

The multiplier

A software developer in Amsterdam uses an LLM to scaffold an entire microservice architecture in an afternoon. She iterates through three design approaches, stress-tests edge cases in conversation, and ships by end of week what would have taken her team a month.

A developer of equal talent in Dhaka has intermittent internet, no access to paid AI tools, and an employer who hasn’t heard of them. He’s writing the same code by hand, the way everyone did two years ago.

Two years ago, they were peers. Today, one is operating at a different speed entirely. Not because she’s smarter or works harder or has a better wandering eye. Because she has access to a tool that multiplies everything she already knows.

This is the new luck. And it compounds daily.