What do the examples have to do with "luck"?
At least 2 of the initial occurrences-the game night working so well and happening to hear about an important market trend-were not caused by any deliberate action on my part. They were basically random and unexpected. Systematizing them and making them continue to happen was not luck, but that's the point of the post.
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.)
People frequently refer to one-off positive events as "lucky breaks", which is why I used that phrase. But I don't care about the word luck specifically. The point of the post is to take one-off positive events or things that worked unexpectedly well and make them happen repeatedly and automatically.
What I see described in this post is something much closer to my concept of "common sense". Is there some very valuable and novel aspect to the content I am overlooking?
Most people don't respond to positive events by setting them up to happen automatically and repeatedly in their lives. The lesson is not "do things you enjoy", it's "take something that worked really well and set it up so that it happens consistently without conscious effort on your part."
Very few people respond to an unexpected positive event with "now I'll set up a system to make this happen repeatedly." Humans are generally good at repeatedly doing things that they intentionally tried and worked well, but not good at spotting the things that happened without effort on their part, but which could be copied and repeated. The game night is again a good example-I didn't set up the initial game night, somebody else did. But I noticed that I enjoyed the game night a lot and got a lot of value out of it, so I set up a repeating game night at my apartment every two weeks.
I encourage people to focus on the "lucky breaks", because those are common blind spots. Another important factor was taking a systematic approach ("let's set up a repeating biweekly game night") as opposed to an effortful approach ("I should attend more game nights.")
People frequently refer to one-off positive events as "lucky breaks", which is why I used that phrase. But I don't care about the word luck specifically. The point of the post is to take one-off positive events or things that worked unexpectedly well and make them happen repeatedly and automatically.
Noted.
Very few people respond to an unexpected positive event with "now I'll set up a system to make this happen repeatedly."
I'm not sure how a "game night" qualifies as an "unexpected positive event". Surely game...
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.