Long Read: How to be lucky

Christian Busch | 17 minutes

Human beings find comfort in certainty. We form governments, make calendars, and create organisations; and we structure our activities, strategies and plans around these constructs. These routines give us the satisfaction of knowing that, by having a plan, there’s a means of it coming to fruition.

Snippets

Kids just plunge in and build their treehouse without worrying about whether they're wasting their time, or how it compares to other treehouses.
And frankly we could learn a lot from kids here.

- Paul Graham, A Project of One's Own

Startups are statistically silly. You’re on a ledge. You stare down. You can see hundreds of bodies are buried there. And yet there’s a queue, miles long, of people cheerily jumping off the cliff. “I’ll just be knitting my wings on the way down, you see”. Why would you ever do this? I find (in myself and other founders) that you never really know the true reason why. It’s just an energy that needs to be deployed.

- Daniel Gross, Startup Energy Theory