Luck Needs a Verb - MAC162

Five words. Hey, I like your podcast.

That's what a man said to a stranger at a free kids' gymnastics class in Brooklyn. A few years later those five words were worth, in his own estimate, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when people hear that story, almost all of them reach for the same explanation: he got lucky.

This week on Managing A Career I want to fix something I've been saying on the show for years. The line wasn't wrong. It was missing a piece, and the missing piece turns out to be the one that does the work.

The Line I Keep Coming Back To

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. I built one of the earliest episodes of this show around it, A Little Bit of Luck (MAC-013). I came back to it in Riding the Coattails of Others (MAC-117), then Manufacturing Serendipity (MAC-147), and most recently Intelligent Failure (MAC-158), where the opportunity was the ambiguous project everyone else was avoiding.

Every one of those episodes is about one of the two ingredients. Get prepared. Then find the opportunity, or build it, or notice it's already in front of you. And every one of them quietly assumed that once you had both, the rest would take care of itself.

It doesn't.

Terry's Version

The missing piece came from an episode of Help Wanted, the podcast Jason Feifer hosts with Nicole Lapin. Jason is the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, and if his name sounds familiar, it's because I've referenced him before. His posts and podcasts have sparked several episodes of this show, including Owning Your Mistakes (MAC-055), Taking Action (MAC-098), A Keg of Ketchup Will Make You Rethink Your Career (MAC-126), and Are You Asking the Right Questions? (MAC-150).

On that episode he sat down with Terry Rice, a business development consultant who writes for the magazine. Jason raises the obvious objection, the same one I just put in your mouth: wasn't that just luck? And Terry answers with a version of my line, with one ingredient added. Luck is when preparation and opportunity are met with action.

Then he maps his own story onto all three, and it is much less magical than "he got lucky."

The preparation was about a year of following Jason's work. Terry listened to the podcast. He read the posts. He commented on as many of them as he could, with real comments. That year is the only reason he recognized the man across the room at a gymnastics class.

The opportunity was the class itself. A free session, and the editor in chief of the magazine Terry had publicly said he wanted to write for was standing there on the phone.

The action was a sequence of small, slightly awkward steps. He walked over, apologized for interrupting, and said those five words. He followed up with a direct message that named specific ways he could help. That became a coffee. That became a short video, recorded unasked, pointing out three or four ways to improve a page Entrepreneur was using to sell a new product.

A few days after the coffee, Jason was in a meeting about a launch where nobody had the marketing background the team needed. Jason said, I know a guy. That's the whole break. Jason tells his side of it in his newsletter, and his read is fair to both of them: part of it was luck, but Terry had built every possible way for that luck to break in his direction.

There's a whole method underneath that story, and it gets its own episode. Terry keeps a list of people he wants to be known by, around forty of them. Connections are made in the comment section, not by sending a connection request. He never asks "how can I help?" He shows up with the help already named. And he is ruthless about not waiting for things to be perfect. Those come later. Today I want to stay with the bigger point: out of the three ingredients, the third is the only one anybody else could see.

Ready vs. Moving

Think about everything Terry did in that year of preparation. Almost all of it happened inside his own head and his own feed. If he had stopped there, he would have been extremely well prepared and completely unknown. The year was real. From Jason's side of the room it was invisible.

There is being ready, and there is moving, and most of us treat the second as something that happens automatically once we've finished the first. Ready is a property of you. Moving is a property of what other people can see.

In thirty years I've watched a lot of genuinely prepared people stay exactly where they were. They'd done the course. They'd noticed the opening, the role next door or the director short on people for a new initiative. They were qualified to walk through the door. Three weeks later it had closed, and from the outside it looked like they'd never been interested.

Nobody saw the preparation. Everybody saw the silence.

A formula that circulates in startup circles makes the same point with a little math: luck equals doing times telling. What you actually do, multiplied by how many people effectively know about it. It's multiplication, not addition, so you can be a ten on doing, and if you're a zero on telling, the answer is still zero. It's the same reason I keep pushing you to post publicly, which we covered in You Need to Be Posting Publicly (MAC-144). The posting was never the point. It's a way of moving work you've already done into a place where someone else can see it.

The Smallest Visible Move

"Take action" is advice you've heard a thousand times and it's never once gotten anybody off the bench. So here is something more concrete. The smallest visible move is the smallest step toward an opportunity that another person could actually notice. Not the biggest step you can imagine. The smallest one that leaves a mark on somebody else.

It comes with a test, which is the whole reason it's useful: if nobody else could know you did it, it was preparation, not action. Run your last month through that. Researching the team you'd like to join? Preparation. Updating your résumé? Preparation. Rehearsing what you'd say to that director if you ever got the chance? Preparation. All of it might be necessary, and none of it has moved you an inch, because none of it has reached another human being.

Now look at what passes. A thoughtful comment on something that director posted. A two-line message to the person running the new initiative. A question asked out loud in the meeting that shows you've been paying attention to their problem. An offer of help that names the help. Terry's first move was five words long. That's the size I'm talking about.

Preparation happens in private. Action happens in front of somebody.

Where Preparation Hides

If the move can be that small, what stops us? Preparation itself. It's the most respectable place there is to hide, because from the inside it feels exactly like progress. I see it take three shapes.

One more course. You've seen the opening and decide you need one more credential before you're allowed to raise your hand. Sometimes that's true. Much more often the people already doing the job don't have it either, and the course is a way of feeling busy while you postpone the moment someone might say no.

One more draft. The message to the hiring manager or the note to the person you met at the conference sits in your drafts for nine days, and each time you open it you improve one sentence and close it again.

One more month. Things will be calmer after the quarter closes, after the reorg settles. This is the most dangerous of the three, because it never feels like a decision. It feels like patience.

It's a close cousin of Analysis Paralysis Is Just Fear Wearing a Lab Coat (MAC-160). That episode was about one decision you keep researching instead of making. This is the broader version: a whole posture of getting ready that never quite turns into going. And while you're getting ready, the window is closing.

Terry tells two stories about his own imperfect action, and I love both. He wrote his messages to Jason in Microsoft Word so he could get them exactly right, then pasted them into Instagram, where they came out with strange spacing and broken lines, and he was sure Jason would think he couldn't use the app. And the coffee: he'd had too much of it, talked fifty miles a minute, and walked out convinced Jason would never speak to him again. Jason doesn't remember either one.

People don't grade you like a teacher grading a paper. They form an overall sense of whether you're trustworthy and whether you're useful, and the polish barely registers. Terry's version is shorter: perfection is the enemy of progress, and time kills deals. The opening you saw three weeks ago was real. It just didn't wait for you.

The imperfect message that gets sent beats the perfect one that's still in your drafts. Every time.

Where You Move Matters

A writer named Carson McKee published a critique of the doing-times-telling formula arguing that it leaves out the environment. Some places are folded: full of hallways, kitchens, and side conversations, so every action brushes up against more people than you planned. Other places are smooth: the format decides every interaction in advance, so you can do a great deal and touch almost nobody. It's a conceptual argument, not a study, but it matches what I've seen inside companies.

The all-hands Q&A is smooth. Everyone hears your question and nobody remembers you. The five minutes after a meeting, when two people stay behind to keep talking, are folded. So is a cross-team working group. A gymnastics class in Brooklyn, it turns out, is extremely folded. Pick your smallest visible move in a folded place if you can. It's the same move. It just lands on more people.

The Action Plan

Four steps, and the first three each come with an AI prompt, because an assistant has no fear of being told no, which makes it very good at spotting exactly where you've been hiding. The last step doesn't get one, because nobody can send the message for you.

1. Name the door you've already seen. One you noticed in the last month and haven't acted on, written in one sentence. If you find three, pick the one you'd regret most if it closed next week.

2. Find where you're hiding. List everything you've been doing to get ready. For each item, ask whether it truly has to happen before you move or could happen after. Most of the list belongs in the second pile.

3. Design the smallest visible move. Pick one move that passes the test, small enough to do today. If it would take more than fifteen minutes, cut it in half.

4. Send it before it's ready. Give yourself forty-eight hours. Not to make it perfect. To make it sent. If it comes out a little awkward, good, that means it's real. Then write down the date, because you'll want to remember this one.

Back to that gymnastics class. A man with a year of preparation behind him saw an opportunity standing across the room, and he had about ten seconds to decide whether to do anything about it. He could have stayed on the bench and gone home with all the same preparation.

Instead he walked over and said five words.

Preparation gets you ready. Opportunity gets you in the room. But luck is something somebody else has to see happen, and nothing happens until you move.

Luck needs a verb. This week, supply one.

Get the Episode + Prompts

The full episode and show notes are at managingacareer.com/162. The three prompts from the action plan are below. Copy them, and change them to fit how you actually work.

Prompt — the door.

I'm going to paste my notes, meeting notes, and a few recent emails from the last month. Find every place where I noticed an opportunity — a role, a project, a person I could help, a problem someone said they had — and did not follow up. For each one, quote the line where it appears and tell me what the opportunity was in one sentence. Do not invent opportunities that aren't in the text, and do not include anything I clearly already acted on. Do not rank them by how exciting they sound. If my notes are too thin to tell, say so and ask me one question instead of guessing.

Prompt — the hiding place.

Here is an opportunity I want to pursue, and a list of everything I've been doing to prepare for it. Sort each item into one of two groups: "must happen before any action" or "could happen after a first small action." For anything you put in the first group, give the specific reason it can't wait. Be strict: if someone already doing this kind of work wouldn't need it, it goes in the second group. Do not tell me my preparation is valuable and do not reassure me. If I haven't given you enough detail to sort an item, mark it "unclear" rather than guessing.

Prompt — the move.

Here is the opportunity, who the person is, and what I know about what they're working on. Draft three different first moves I could make toward them, each one doable in under fifteen minutes and each one visible to that person: for example, a comment, a short message, or a question I could ask in a meeting. Keep any message under 80 words. Never use the phrase "let me know how I can help"; if a draft offers help, it has to name the specific help. Do not flatter the person and do not invent facts about them or their work — use only what I've told you, and if you need something I haven't given you, ask me for it. Do not make any of them sound more polished than a real person would write.

Links & References

• Research & sources — Money Rehab / Help Wanted: The Foolproof Way to Slide Into Someone's DMs (episode transcript)
• Research & sources — Jason Feifer: Did You Meet Someone Useful? Here's How to Make the Most of It
• Research & sources — Doug Belshaw: Luck = (Passionate) Doing x (Effective) Telling
• Research & sources — Carson McKee: Luck Surface Area, Revised
• Episode inspiration — Help Wanted (Jason Feifer and Nicole Lapin) with Terry Rice: The Foolproof Way to Slide Into Someone's DMs, on Spotify
• Episode inspiration — Terry Rice at Entrepreneur
• Episode inspiration — Jason Feifer on LinkedIn
• Related Managing A Career episodes — A Little Bit of Luck (MAC-013)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — Owning Your Mistakes (MAC-055)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — Taking Action (MAC-098)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — Riding the Coattails of Others (MAC-117)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — A Keg of Ketchup Will Make You Rethink Your Career (MAC-126)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — You Need to Be Posting Publicly (MAC-144)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — Manufacturing Serendipity (MAC-147)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — Are You Asking the Right Questions? (MAC-150)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — Intelligent Failure (MAC-158)
• Related Managing A Career episodes — Analysis Paralysis Is Just Fear Wearing a Lab Coat (MAC-160)

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