Engineer Your Own Luck

“Chance favors the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur

Are you feeling lucky?

If you’re an engineer or a developer, you’ll appreciate the idea that you can design for luck, or stack the deck in your favor.

How do you do this?

As Harry Golden said, "The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work."

While I believe in hard work, I also believe in working smarter.

Luck is the same game.

It’s a game of skill.

And, success is a numbers game. 

You have to stay in long enough to get “lucky” over time.   That means finding a sustainable approach and using a sustainable system.  It means avoiding going all in without testing your assumptions and reducing the risk out of it.   It means taking emotion out of the equation, taking calculated risks, minimizing your exposure, and focusing on skills.

That’s why Agile methods and Lean approaches can help you outpace your failures.

Because they are test-driven and focus on continuous learning.

And because they focus on capacity and capability versus burnout or blowup.

So if you aren’t feeling the type of luck you’d like to see more of in your life, go back to the basics, and design for it.

They funny thing about luck is that the less you depend on it, the more of it you get.

BTW – Agile Results and Getting Results the Agile Way continue to help people “get lucky.”  Recently, I heard a story where a social worker shared Getting Results the Agile Way with two girls living off the streets.  They are off drugs now, have jobs, and are buying homes.   I’m not doing the story justice, but it’s great to hear about people turning their lives around and these kinds of life changing things that a simple system for meaningful results can help achieve.

It’s not luck. 

It’s desire, determination, and effective strategies applied in a sustainable way.

The Agile way.