How to Get Lucky: The Art of Seducing Opportunity

In the hustle culture space Naval Ravikant gets a bit too much credit and in the intellectual space perhaps not enough. It is a sign of a great thinker to be surrounded by such controversy. 

I found Naval at the beginning of my career. In reality, I had already been working many years before that, but my work was meaningless. In that work I found no sense of meaning, excitement, or urgency. I still thought about work in the manner of an employee, rather than an owner; I now know that the approach one takes toward an object is in some sense more important than the object itself. 

Naval stresses the importance of finding work that feels like play– that to find such work for oneself is not only a great blessing but in some sense a moral obligation. I’d found that sort of meaningful work for myself in video production, and yet my opportunities in that field were slim (read: none). 

One of Naval’s concepts I used frequently was this concept of luck as something that one could sort of manufacture for oneself. He presents a few methods toward doing so. The one I found most reliable in the beginning was motion:

“Motion can be described as energy, effort, busyness, hustle, persistence, etc. It occurs when you are running around creating lots of possible opportunities. You are meeting people, experimenting, stirring up dust, and seeing what comes of it.” 

Urban Dictionary describes having motion as “to be accomplishing things at a good speed.” E.g. “Jamal just bought his own apartment in the Heights, he got that motion, for real.” So let me show you how to have motion. I will do so by expanding on Naval’s concept of “stirring up dust.” 

First, whatever you’re trying to do, you need to actually be applying some real energy to it. 90% of the people who are reading this are really, really convinced that they are doing work on the side project they want to turn into a full time gig– and they’re simply lying to themselves. We are incredibly good at convincing ourselves of our own productivity. You need to actually guarantee yourself that you are expending considerable energy in pursuit of whatever you’re trying to build for yourself. A simple heuristic I like to use is this; imagine you have a bodycam attached to your chest and someone outside of you is judging your levels of productivity for that day. Would they (not you) agree that the work you did today was considerable? If not, you need to apply more energy to your pursuit.

Second, you need to persist– meaning, you must commit to the mindset that your goal is so worthy of chasing that you quite literally do not care how long it takes to achieve. This is crucial, especially because you need to understand it takes a very, very long time to build anything worthwhile. Patience is indispensable to the creative professional. A good heuristic is to imagine your expected timeline for success and then to multiply it by fiive. If after that you say “yes, I still want to do the thing,” congratulations; you are chasing the optimally motivating goal and are also in a state of mental preparedness for all the heartache that may ensue this path you’re on (the noble path).. 

Third, you need to be going out in the world and building publicly. I do not care how good your online marketing is; you need to be interacting in the world with real people, making meaningful connections, getting sweaty, being seen doing whatever it is you hope to do for a living. Some of my best video clients were found because a random person saw me on the street with my camera, working, and they were looking for some help on an upcoming project. Those would have never happened had I not gone out of my apartment. In fact, if you are a young twenty-something, I can think of no good reason for you to be in your apartment during the day. Go explore. Apartments are for sleeping and nothing else. I don’t care if it is work you can do at home; get outside. 

Fourth, take on way more than you can handle. In the beginning when you have no opportunities, accept way more than you think you can manage. This works twofold; it places you in odd situations with new people learning new things and inevitably develops your network, your skillset, and your personality. All of these things are crucial for the professional creative. Additionally, it proves something you knew all along, which is that you are actually capable of doing far more than you thought. 

I realized this while working on the set of my friend’s film. We were sleeping on the floor of a dilapidated camper for 14 days straight trying to get his movie finished under budget. I was playing one of the main characters of the film and doing setwork and also shooting BTS for a little documentary I was doing on the film. I slept in costume every night. Days were long (around 14 hours), it rained constantly. But something weird happened– around day 4: I realized I was having more fun suffering for this sort of work than I would’ve had I been home watching TV. I could actually work a lot harder and longer than I originally thought possible, and that was all due to the nature of the work I chose for myself. 

And to be honest, I may have lied earlier in this piece. I don’t think Naval ever says that finding meaningful work is a moral obligation– but I do. Parks does. Parks says that if you do not go out of your way to seek to do the things you are called to do then you not only deprive yourself of something but the world and everyone in it of something.

 “The world is not what it could be because we are not what we could be.” 

There is work out there for you to do that would be more fulfilling than the most ecstatic play. I’m convinced such work reverses aging. It won’t find you. You have to go out and kick up dust.