Create Surface Area for Luck

Visible limited downside, Invisible unlimited upside...

Most of us are terrible at weighing risk against reward in opportunities. We see the downside clearly — losing money, wasting time, looking foolish — but the upside remains hazy and improbable. This blindness costs us more than we realize. The best opportunities in life share a peculiar structure: limited, visible downside paired with unlimited, invisible upside.

Consider writing online. The cost? A few hours of focused work. The risk? Maybe no one reads it, which bruises your ego but doesn't actually harm you. Yet we treat this as if we're considering a dangerous leap. Meanwhile, any piece you write could change someone's life, or reach someone who changes your life — a future employer, collaborator, or co-founder might be reading right now. The downside is capped at the time you spent. The upside has no ceiling.

This pattern appears in many places. Reaching out to interesting people costs five minutes and risks silence. Building a side project costs some weekends. Reading deeply in a field costs Netflix time. In each case, we fixate on the guaranteed small loss and ignore the possible massive gain.

The problem isn't just uncertainty — it's invisibility. When you publish something, you can't see the five hundred people who read it silently, the person who bookmarked it to share months later, or how it shifted someone's thinking in ways that will ripple through their decisions. The costs sit right in front of you. The benefits exist in other people's minds, in connections not yet made, in futures not yet shaped.

This invisibility, especially early on in any endeavour, creates what I call the drought — that soul-crushing period where your efforts seem to vanish into the void. You write for months to crickets. You send thoughtful emails to silence. You're planting seeds in what feels like concrete. The cruel joke? This is exactly what early exponential growth looks like. The curve that eventually shoots skyward spends most of its time looking indistinguishable from zero.

The most successful people I know have mastered two skills. First, they create surface area for luck. They understand that exposure to opportunity requires building assets that work while they sleep:

Public permanent assets — Be out there and produce permanent content. Writing stays written. Code stays running. Every piece of work becomes a lottery ticket that never expires, quietly working to connect you with people and possibilities.

Compounding activities — Some efforts naturally breed more opportunities. Your tenth blog post builds on the audience from your first nine. Each project makes the next one easier and more likely to succeed. The rich get richer, but first you have to get a little bit rich.

Have at least an audience of 1 — Ask: Would I read my own writing? And generally: am I solving my own problems? Is there even one person who eagerly awaits everything I create? These whispers often predict future volume better than early numbers.

The second skill is harder: choosing which opportunities to pursue when they start flowing. This is where most people stumble. When someone wants you to join their startup, or collaborate on a project, or dive into a new field, you're betting on a fog of unknowns. Who else is involved? What might change? What don't you know that could sink everything?

The people who choose well think differently. They reason from fundamentals rather than following crowds. They've built deep expertise in at least one area, which helps them recognize patterns others miss. Most crucially, they've calibrated their intuition through experience — they sense when something feels off even if they can't explain why. Selection is art; execution is merely craft.

But what happens when you're working through either path — expanding your serendipity or exploiting an opportunity — and it's still not working out? You face a crucial choice: "I'm in the drought but should persist" versus "This particular avenue has no potential reward and I should pivot". There's no simple answer. This is where the quality of your intuition comes into play, built from your knowledge and experience in the world. The best approach involves regular reflection, checking the actual numbers measuring whatever you're trying to do, and assessing the chance of future fortune without getting too attached to what you've already invested. This also means giving yourself adequate time to think — committing to a week of work deserves at least an hour of thinking about that commitment.

Here's what took me years to understand: We're playing the wrong game. We systematically overvalue visible, certain, limited rewards and undervalue invisible, uncertain, unlimited ones. A promotion with a 10% raise feels safer than a side project with unknown potential. But that safety is often an illusion, and that unknown potential is often enormous.

The mathematics are stark. When downside is truly capped and upside is truly uncapped, you only need to win occasionally to come out far ahead. Yet most people won't make these bets. They can't see the upside. They can't stomach the drought.

This is wonderful news. It means the biggest opportunities remain systematically underpriced. While others chase visible but capped wins, you can pursue invisible wins with no caps at all. The question isn't whether these asymmetric bets exist — they're everywhere. The question is how many you can find and nurture before the world realizes what you're doing.

The drought always ends. The connections always come. Not through magic or luck, but through the simple arithmetic of exposing yourself to unlimited upside enough times that eventually, inevitably, something extraordinary happens.