Today I’d like to share a little ‘ol PDF that has really inspired some major changes in my life.
About 3 weeks ago I woke up in my apartment on Miami Beach and realized I was unhappy. If you had asked me the day before I’m sure I could have launched into a really compelling case for why I loved Miami Beach. But the truth was… it just wasn’t the right environment for me.
There was a 2 year old in the apartment right above me who would run around and thomp thomp thomp around and drive me mad, usually starting at 7:30 each morning. I’d wake up and be annoyed throughout the day. Having just read Tynan’s article on low priorities, I realized how important the little things in my environment are.
Right around the same time, I happened upon this pdf – The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman, which got me thinking about the optimal way to create “luck” in my life.
After spending the last few years of my life learning about biases and superstitions, I have no illusions about the more hippy dippy connotations that surround the word “luck”. I mostly see it as a positive bias / filtering mechanism of experiences in life.
The catch for me though – is that in order to use my sharpshooter fallacy and survivorship bias to my advantage, I need to take enough shots (to then be able to pick the “wins” in retrospect).
I realized I needed to change my environment and create a life where I’m constantly faced with new opportunities (people, connections, places, environments, etc).
So about a week ago Ashley and I moved to LA and have been putting ourselves in a lots of new situations, meeting lots of new people, and varying up where and how we spend our time.
My major takeaways from the Luck Factor (pdf) have been:
- Introduce a lot more variance into my life so I can unearth new opportunities.
- Take a lot more chances, make more decisions, knowing that a good number of them won’t work out.
- Get better at recognizing / celebrating good events and forgetting / letting go of bad events.
- Widen my focus. If my focus is too narrow I’ll miss the opportunities to see new connections and things outside of the specific thing I’m looking for.
I haven’t written in a long time so please excuse my writing as I try to get back into that groove..
creative commons photo credit: Mohammed Alnaser
