What do the examples have to do with "luck"? Each example seems to be more about paying attention to the circumstances in your present situation and then making a choice. If those choices yield good results, maybe you make them again. If those choices have less than good results, stop making them.
My understanding of luck is a situation where the circumstances "break" in your favor regardless of your attention or intention, or even in opposition to most likely outcome. (e.g. I was lucky not to get injured when X happened and many poeple around me were injured.)
What I see described in this post is something much closer to my concept of "common sense".
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Note:
This post reminds me of aspects of a recent discussion on LW.
I'm confused as to why people are voting it up. It is a nice reminder to do stuff you enjoy, ask for help and pay attention to trends, and I'm not disagreeing with it's rating per se... but I'm sincerely interested as to why, at the time of my comment, this post has drawn the apparent acclaim that it has compared to say, this post or this one (the latter post I also think is rather nice-but-obvious).
Do people at LW know and really like the author of this post?
Is there some very valuable and novel aspect to the content I am overlooking?
Are people upvoting because they simply say, "This is generally true"?
Anyway, the post is a nice reminder to reach out to an expert so I am going to try do do that today. (Because the "systematic luck" I've observed in my life comes from not simply reading good advice, but incorporating it by actually doing.)
But I do think this post is a good example of the gaps created by the current "like/don't like" rating format and inferential slience that exists in the comment system.
I'm confused as to why people are voting it up.
Speaking for myself: It is a simple actionable advice, and although it seems obvious in hindsight, people like me don't follow it automatically.
I am not sure, maybe some people are doing this automatically, but for me it is not a usual way of thinking to 1) list the good things in my life, 2) find the situations that created them, and 3) try to replicate those situations. Sometimes, very rarely, I do the first part, and maybe with one very specific situation I tried the second and the third parts. Okay, the...
Many people can point to significant events that improved their lives in a positive way. They often refer to these as "lucky breaks", and take it for granted that such events are rare. But most of the time "lucky breaks" don't need to be uncommon-you can often reverse engineer the reasons behind them and cause them to happen more frequently. So when a one-off event ends up contributing a lot of value, you should systematically make it part of your life.
Example 1: in June the Less Wrong - Cambridge community held a mega-meetup with several people arriving from out of state. Since several of us had to stay up until 2AM+ in order to meet with people, we decided to have a game night that evening, which I held at my place. The game night was excellent-plenty of people showed up, we all had a lot of fun, and it was a great way to socialize with several people. Since it went so well, I started hosting game nights regularly, eventually converging on one game night every two weeks. This was a phenomenal move in many ways-it let me meet a lot of interesting people, deepen my connections with my friends, quickly integrate with the Less Wrong community, and just in general have a lot of fun, simply by taking one thing that worked well and making it systematic.
Example 2: a while back I was given an assignment to set up a scalable analytic architecture to allow data scientists to iterate faster-a project where I had no idea what to do or how to start. In desperation, I reached out to several people on LinkedIn who had experience with similar projects. Some of them responded, and the advice I got was incredibly valuable, easily shaving months off of my learning curve. But there is no reason for me to only do this when I am completely desperate. Thus I’ve continued to reach out to experts when I have new projects, and this has allowed me to avoid mistakes and solve new problems much more quickly. This has significantly improved my learning speed and made a qualitative difference in how I work. I no longer dismiss potential ideas simply because I have no idea how to implement them-instead, I now talk to experts and figure out roughly how difficult those ideas are, which has allowed me to solve several problems I would have dismissed as unfeasibly difficult before.
Example 3: a few years back some of my friends in the tech industry mentioned that Machine Learning was becoming a trend, so I took two weeks to learn the basics. A few months later the "Big Data" boom exploded, and I was able to get a job as a Data Scientist at a significantly higher salary doing more interesting work. Even though my Machine Learning knowledge was pretty rudimentary, I was able to get the job because demand completely exceeded supply at that point. In short, this was a lucky break that greatly advanced my career. To systematize this I simply continued to keep an eye out on big trends in technology. I've read Hacker News (which is generally half a year or more ahead of the mainstream), kept in touch with my friends on the applied side of academia (which feeds useful techniques into the industry), and just generally kept talking to a lot of people in order to keep up-to-date. This has been useful again and again, allowing me to focus my learning on the most valuable skills right as there was market demand.
In short, one of the fastest ways to improve your life is to look at things that already made a big difference before, and cause more of them to happen.