A Formula for Luck

Depth × Visibility × Shots × Time

There is a story we tell about successful people.

We say they got lucky. Right place, right time. Things just worked out for them.

It’s a comforting story. It lets us off the hook.

It’s also wrong.

The first time I heard the phrase “increasing your surface area of opportunity” was inside Adobe, from Scott Belsky.

It stuck with me. Because hidden inside those few words is a claim most people never let themselves believe: you can increase your chances of winning.

Not guarantee.

Increase it, deliberately, systematically.

Luck isn’t random. Luck is formulaic. It’s the output of a small number of variables, multiplied together, over time. Which means it isn’t something that happens to you.

Here’s the formula:

Opportunity = Depth × Visibility × Shots × Time

Four variables:

How good you are.

How discoverable you are.

How many attempts you make.

How long you stay in the game.

Multiply them together and you get your surface area of opportunity, the total amount of luck that can physically reach you.

Simple. Almost too simple.

Until you add one word: Multiply.

Zero Is Fatal

If the formula were additive, you could compensate. Weak in one area, strong in another. It averages out. You’d be fine.

But it’s not additive. It’s multiplicative.

And in multiplication, zero is fatal.

10 × 10 × 10 × 0 = 0.

You can be world-class at three variables. If the fourth is zero, your output is zero. Not reduced. Not diminished. Zero.

This is the single most important thing to understand about success, and almost nobody understands it.

Most people don’t fail because they’re weak everywhere. They fail because they’re zero somewhere.

The brilliant engineer nobody has heard of. Depth of ten. Visibility of zero. Output: zero.

The loud personality with nothing behind the noise. Visibility of ten. Depth of zero. Output: zero.

The perfectionist who has spent four years polishing something they’ve never shipped. Depth of ten. Shots of zero. Output: zero.

The person who does everything right for eight months and quits. Time approaching zero. Output approaching zero.

None of these things make people lazy. Its not a lack of talent. They’ve just multiplied everything they have by 0, somewhere in the chain.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: The variable you’ve zeroed out is usually the one you’ve told yourself doesn’t matter. The engineer thinks marketing is beneath them. The marketer thinks craft is optional. The perfectionist thinks shipping early is reckless.

Your zero is almost always hiding behind a story you tell yourself about why that variable doesn’t count.

It counts.

It’s the only thing that counts. Because it’s the thing setting everything else to nothing.

Let’s take each variable apart.

Depth Changes the Odds on Every Shot

Pick a problem and go deep.

Not five problems. One problem, deep enough that you see things other people can’t see.

Depth is the quality multiplier on everything else you do. It’s what turns a random attempt into a calibrated one. Shallow shots are lottery tickets. Deep shots are loaded dice.

Two people each take a hundred shots. One has spent three years going deep on a specific problem. The customers. The failure modes. The things everyone in the space believes that are wrong. The other has spent three years skimming across ten different spaces.

Same number of shots. Completely different hit rates.

The deep person isn’t guessing better - they’re playing a different game. They see the shot before it exists. They know which doors are worth knocking on because they understand what’s behind them. Their luck looks uncanny from the outside. It’s just pattern recognition, earned on a narrow surface.

Depth does something else too. It makes you the person opportunities are for.

Another friend of mine told me years ago: You need to be in the top 1% of people in your industry to get the top 1% of opportunities. He was right too.

When something breaks in a space, when a market shifts, when someone needs an answer fast, the opportunity doesn’t go to whoever’s nearby. It goes to whoever’s known for that thing.

Depth is what makes you the obvious answer to a question you haven’t been asked yet.

The mistake people make with depth is treating it as sufficient.

It isn’t. Depth is necessary and completely useless on its own. The world is full of deep people nobody has ever heard of. Their expertise dies in the room they’re sitting in if they are silent abut it.

Which brings us to the variable skilled people are most likely to set to zero.

You Can’t Get Lucky in Private

Every opportunity that has ever reached you, every job offer, every introduction, every deal, every investment reached you because someone knew you existed and knew what you were about.

Every single one. There are no exceptions.

Opportunity travels through awareness.

And yet visibility is the variable talented people zero out most often. Usually with pride.

“I let my work speak for itself.”

Your work doesn’t speak. Your work sits in a folder. Your work is invisible to the 99.99% of the world that has never encountered it and never will. The belief that quality is self-distributing is the most common way skilled people multiply themselves by zero.

Visibility isn’t vanity. It’s infrastructure.

It works like a funnel, because that’s exactly what it is. Awareness. Consideration. Preference. Conversion. People need to know you exist. Then they need to understand what you do. Then they need to prefer you over the alternatives. Then, and only then, does opportunity convert; the intro gets made, the deal gets offered, the door opens.

Most people try to skip straight to conversion. They want the opportunity without building the pipeline that carries it. That’s not how funnels work. The opportunities you get this year were built by the visibility you created last year.

This is why building an audience; a following, a network, a reputation, a public body of work, is not a side project. It’s the distribution layer for your entire career.

Don’t underestimate it.

One piece of work seen by the right person outperforms a hundred pieces of work seen by no one.

And something changes when visibility compounds. Opportunity stops being something you chase and starts being something that finds you. Inbound replaces outbound. The best opportunities in most people’s lives are ones they never applied for, never pitched, never planned. They arrived because enough of the right people knew what that person stood for.

You cannot plan for those opportunities. You can only make yourself findable when they come looking.

The formula is brutal on this point. Depth of ten, visibility of zero, output of zero.

The world doesn’t reward the best. It rewards the best known.

The Winners Hide in the Volume

Here the formula gets interesting.

Most people believe success comes from picking the right shot. Study harder, analyse longer, choose better. Take the one perfect swing.

This is backwards. And there’s a reason it’s backwards: outcomes follow a power law.

In any domain with real upside; companies, content, careers, investments, ideas - the returns are not evenly distributed. A tiny number of attempts produce almost all of the results. One post out of a hundred drives half the audience. One deal out of fifty returns the fund. One conversation out of a thousand changes the trajectory of your life.

And here’s the part that breaks people: You cannot know in advance which one it will be.

Not because you’re not smart enough - because it’s not knowable.

The outlier outcomes depend on timing, context, and collisions you can’t see coming. The post that goes everywhere is rarely the one you laboured over. The intro that changes everything is rarely the one you engineered.

Once you accept this, the strategy inverts completely.

If you can’t pick the winning shot, the only rational move is to take more shots. Specifically, more shots where the downside is capped and the upside is uncapped.

This asymmetry is the entire game. A piece of content costs you an hour and can open ten doors. A cold message costs you five minutes and can fund a company. A small experiment costs you a weekend and can reveal a market. Lose one. Or make a hundred. When the downside is bounded and the upside isn’t, volume isn’t recklessness.

Volume is the strategy.

The person who takes one shot a year needs to be right. The person who takes one shot a week just needs to stay in the game. One of these is gambling. It’s not the one you think.

Repetition matters for a second reason: Shots aren’t just attempts at outcomes.

They’re the mechanism of improvement. Every shot returns data. Every rep sharpens the next one. The hundredth attempt isn’t the same quality as the first. It’s the first attempt plus ninety-nine lessons.

Which means shots don’t just increase your exposure to luck. They increase your depth at the same time.

It takes time and repetition for anything good to happen. Not because the world is slow. Because that’s what the distribution demands. The outliers only show up in volume.

The perfectionist taking one flawless shot every two years isn’t being disciplined. They’re refusing to participate in the mathematics of their own success.

Time in the Game Beats Everything

The biggest reason people succeed or fail is time in the game.

Not talent. Not connections. Not capital. Time.

Depth accumulates over time. Visibility compounds over time. Shots aggregate over time. Time isn’t just the fourth variable. It’s the one that lets the other three do their work.

And it’s the variable people zero out most quietly.

Nobody announces they’re setting time to zero. They just quit.

Eighteen months in. Two years in. Right at the point where the curve was about to bend.

Here’s why the timing of quitting is so consistently tragic. Everything in this formula compounds, and compounding is invisible at the start. The first year of building depth feels like nothing. The first year of building visibility feels like shouting into a void. The first hundred shots mostly miss.

If you judge the system by its early output, you will always conclude it’s broken.

It isn’t broken. It’s loading.

Compounding has a shape, and the shape is a hockey stick. Flat for ages. Then vertical. The flat part isn’t failure: It’s the price of the vertical part.

But because the flat part looks identical to going nowhere, most people exit during it. They pay the full cost of compounding and leave before collecting any of the return.

Meanwhile, the people who look suddenly successful have simply been in the game long enough for their variables to multiply. Ten years of depth. Ten years of visibility. A thousand shots. From the outside, it looks like an overnight arrival. Thats why you hear the phrase “Ten year overnight success” - because thats how long it usually takes to become great.

Time does something subtler too. It lets randomness work in your favour.

Luck needs runway. The longer you’re exposed, visible, active, taking shots, the more collisions you accumulate. The chance meeting. The market shift that suddenly makes your depth relevant. The old shot that pays off years later.

None of this can happen to someone who left.

You don’t need to be the smartest person in your field. You need to still be there when it matters. Survival is wildly underrated as a strategy.

The Variables Feed Each Other

Here’s where the formula gets really powerful.

These four variables aren’t independent. They compound each other.

Depth makes your shots better. Better shots create results worth being visible for. Visibility brings opportunities that deepen your expertise. Time multiplies all of it and makes the flywheel spin faster with each rotation.

This means two things.

First: because it’s multiplication, small improvements are enormous. Double any single variable and you double your total surface area of opportunity. Go twice as deep, become twice as findable, take twice as many shots, or stay twice as long. Any one of them doubles your luck. Improve two and you’ve quadrupled it.

You don’t need to transform your life. You need to move one number.

Second: fixing your zero is worth more than improving your strength. This is the counterintuitive bit, and it’s where almost everyone allocates effort wrongly. A ten who becomes an eleven at their best variable gains ten percent. A ten who takes their zero to a two goes from no output to actual output. Mathematically that’s an infinite improvement.

The highest ROI work you can do is always on your weakest multiplier. Always. And it will always be the work you least want to do, because your zero exists precisely where your resistance lives.

Find Your Zero

Four questions. Be honest, because the formula will be whether you are or not.

Depth. Have you picked a problem and gone deep, or are you skimming across five things, expert in none? If someone in your space had a hard question, would your name come up?

Visibility. If the perfect opportunity for you existed right now, could it find you? Does anyone outside your immediate circle know what you’re about? Or is your work speaking for itself, silently, in a folder?

Shots. How many real attempts have you made in the last ninety days? Not plans. Not drafts. Attempts. Things that left your hands and entered the world where they could succeed or fail.

Time. Are you playing a game you can stay in for years? Or have you designed something you’ll abandon the moment the flat part of the curve gets boring?

One of those questions made you flinch.

That’s your zero.

And now you know what most people never figure out. Your problem was never the variables you’re good at.

You were never one more course, one more polish, one more credential away.

You were multiplying excellence by nothing and wondering why the output stayed at nothing.

The Formula Doesn’t Care

Luck is a formula.

Opportunity = Depth × Visibility × Shots × Time.

Go deep on one problem until you see what others can’t. Make yourself findable, because you can’t get lucky in private. Take more shots than feels comfortable, because the winners hide in the volume. And stay in the game long enough for the multiplication to happen.

The formula doesn’t care about your talent. It doesn’t care about your intentions. It doesn’t care how hard you’re working on the variables you enjoy.

It only cares about the product of all four.

So stop asking whether you’re lucky.

Find your zero. Fix it.

Then see how lucky you get.