“The amount of good luck coming your way depends on your willingness to act.” -Barbara Sher

I'm incredibly lucky.

I'm 6’1”. I was born in the United States. I grew up in California, about 90 minutes from Silicon Valley; the greatest wealth engine in the history of humanity. My parents loved me. I have a great sister, and had some of the best extended family and grandparents one could ask for.

None of those things were my doing. I didn't earn any of them. They were the cards I was dealt.

Yes, the hand we’re dealt matters, but what’s more important is how we play it.

We can be born with extraordinary luck and still squander it.

We can be born with very little luck and compound it.

I’ve also done a fairly decent job of playing the hand I was dealt.

I consistently introduce myself to strangers. I’ve been rejected more times than I can count. I’ve had multiple failed entrepreneurial ventures. I’m willing to post my opinions publicly on the internet. I’ve intentionally put myself in hundreds of uncomfortable situations and will continue to do so in the future.

Those were all choices I made that have helped me become luckier. I’ve made a deliberate choice to proactively increase my luck. And you can too.

The difference between someone who underuses what they were given and someone who turns a small starting hand into something extraordinary — almost always comes down to one thing: courage.

Most people don't think of luck as a courage problem.

They should.

Here’s why.

Most people are familiar with Seneca’s quote:

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

I absolutely agree with that statement, but think it’s incomplete.

Luck is more nuanced than that.

My favorite definition is from Naval Ravikant, because he segments luck into four kinds:

Only the first kind is given. The other three are earned.

And each successive level of luck requires more courage to access than the last.

Let’s go back to the quote we opened the newsletter with.

"The amount of good luck coming your way depends on your willingness to act."

Understanding this is essential for two reasons:

First: the willingness to act is a variable we can control. Everything I just described — hustle luck, prepared-mind luck, unique-character luck, is based on that phrase.

Second: courage, by definition, is the willingness to act… in the face of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is about taking action despite the presence of fear.

In his 2012 book The Courage Quotient, researcher, author, and psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener represented courage mathematically with this deceptively simple equation:

This simple equation changed my life.

Please take the time to really understand this concept.

We become more courageous by increasing the numerator (e.g. the willingness to act) and/or decreasing the denominator (e.g. fear).

When I first saw this, it triggered an “aha moment” for me. I’d just found a scientifically-backed, systematic and repeatable path to helping anyone become more courageous.This was’t “rah-rah” woo-woo stuff. It was basic math.

This is the foundation of the Courage Operating System and everything else I’m building at DailyCourage.

Now re-read the equation as a luck equation.

Sher said luck depends on willingness to act. Biswas-Diener said willingness to act is the numerator of courage. Stack the two ideas on top of each other and you get something this newsletter has been circling:

Your luck quotient and your courage quotient are nearly the same number.

Which means "how do I get luckier?" and "how do I get more courageous?" aren't two different questions. They're the same question, asked twice.

The neuroscience of luck is well-documented.

Mensa member, Jenny Rankin Grant, PhD wrote about it in PsychologyToday.

Last week, Mel Robbins had Tina Seelig, a Stanford neuroscientist, on her podcast to talk about it in depth.

There's also well-known study by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman, who spent years studying people who described themselves as either "lucky" or "unlucky."

He gave both groups the same test: a newspaper, with instructions to count the photographs inside.

Halfway through the paper, he'd planted a half-page ad reading:

"Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you've seen this and win £250."

The “lucky” people saw the ad. The “unlucky” people didn't.

Why?

Because anxious, fearful, narrow-focused attention literally collapses your visual field. Your brain stops scanning for the unexpected. You see what you came to see and you miss the half-page sign offering you money.

This is the neuroscience of luck. The reticular activating system — the part of your brain that filters what reaches your conscious attention — is shaped by what you expect.

Expect scarcity, see scarcity. Expect openness, see openness. People who think of themselves as lucky walk through the same world the rest of us do, but they see more of it.

Now apply that to a career, a relationship, a community.

Fear of rejection kills hustle luck. You don't send the cold email. You don't ask for the introduction. You stay where it's familiar, where you know the floor, where the worst that happens is nothing happens.

Scarcity mindset kills compounding luck. When something good finally happens — a meeting, an offer, a stroke of fortune…you don't double down. You shrink. You assume it was a fluke and refuse to lean in.

Short-term thinking kills unique-character luck. Staying in the comfortable role, not investing in the relationship that won't pay off for five years, not joining the community where you'd be the least impressive person in the room — these are the moves that close the door on the kind of luck that takes a decade to build and then arrives all at once.

There's an idea Alex Hormozi has popularized that cuts straight through everything I just wrote: volume negates luck.

The math is worth taking seriously, because once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Suppose you’re unemployed and looking for work. Instead of waiting to hear back from employers you decide to send cold messages to hiring managers directly on LinkedIn.

Suppose each cold message you send has a 2% response rate, meaning 98 out of every 100 people you send a message to don't reply.

You haven't gotten luckier between message 1 and message 200. The probability per message hasn't changed. What changed is that you stopped letting a single roll of the dice decide your outcome.

The same math runs everywhere.

The content creator who "got lucky" with a viral post in their second year of daily publishing isn't luckier than the one who posted twice and quit. They just rolled the dice three hundred and sixty-three more times.

Most people stop at message five, or post ten, because the silence and rejection in between feel unbearable.

They quit before the math kicks in.

This is why courage is the bottleneck on luck and why I do Shoot Your Shot Sunday.

The math is on your side.

You just have to be willing to your job enough times for the math to do its part.

Here's your reflection for the week:

Most people are sitting on luck they don't recognize and aren't using.

So here's the question I want you to ask yourself:

Where have I been given a lucky advantage that I’m not fully using?

Maybe you're naturally good with people, but you've spent a decade in a job where you don't talk to any. Maybe you grew up bilingual and your work has nothing to do with language. Maybe you have dual citizenship but haven’t fully leveraged it. Maybe you're great-looking and you've never put yourself on camera. Maybe your network is incredible and you've never asked anyone in it for anything.

Whatever it is — name it. Sit with the discomfort of how much of it you've left on the table. Let that motivate you to take action. Remember, courage is all about the willingness to act.

Here's your challenge for the week:

Pick ONE action that increases your luck surface area in the next seven days.

Some examples:

The point isn't the result. The point is doing the courage rep. You are training yourself to put yourself in motion — to widen the field where luck can find you.

Most people will read this newsletter and do nothing. That, too, is a courage problem.

Don't be most people.

With courage,

Jonathan