The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and return it to your safe

Serendipity favours the prepared mind.

I think it's not prepared. More like a willingness to be open to possibilities. Preparation assume you know something good is coming and can prepare now to face it. Those kind of events are probably not that life changing. Of course there are exceptions.

But best things in life come from opportunities that you cannot prepare for in advance. Just willingness to accept it.

Perhaps pedantic, but "prepared mind" includes your meaning. Prepared may mean being equipped with a skill that meets the moments, but flexibility, acceptance and optimism are also skills of a prepared mind.

It's why the quote has survived since 1854.

> "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

I don't think it is pedantic at all. A prepared mind is exactly what is needed to take advantage of opportunity. Prepared mentally denotes a state of mind where you are actively looking for opportunities and that allows you to notice them. It is an attitude, really. Not unlike being a Stoic is an attitude on gratefulness of life and acceptance of death.

Not recognizing and pursuing opportunities is one of my greatest regrets in life. Going to work like hell to teach my kids different.

I used to think the same (and still have regrets about missed opportunities, ie sleepwalking them). But then I think that I'm probably disregarding some other opportunities that I did take and just forgot about them because "For it falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth ..."

Damn straight.

Often, being at the right place at the right time is more of a matter of predicting the places to be and arriving there in advance of said right time.

But however you want to spin it, there’s still the underlying luck, that you survived until that moment, that you were able to reach that place and that you were free to venture there are all inputs you didn’t have much or any control over. There’s no shame in it. I’ve achieved a good deal in a half century of life and much of it was via hard work and guile, but I do tend to think of myself as lucky because, even as a middle-class kid back when the US had that, where my starting blocks were placed on the track was far enough ahead of the bulk of the pack that these things became achievable.

I like to call it "Exposing yourself to luck." You can't win lottery if you never play. Play the lottery with the best odds and play it as much as you can.

Other than moving to the right location, what are other ways to expose yourself to luck?

I think it’s just trying to be exposed to as many opportunities as possible with the best tools you can have. You can’t determine whether or not you can catch a fish, but you can acquire the best fish-catching tools you can get, try to get to the fullest river, and stay out there as long as you can. I think the role of “luck” really hits when you realize how some people are born on the side of the river with a gigantic, well-made net.

You won't always be right but you can be there often enough to matter. goals need to be reasoneble - the luck needed to be a billionair is unlikely, but if you settle for millionair that luck is likely if you invest your money in the right place.

"I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson

There's lots of similar quotes throughout time, all about what you say in your list line: to be lucky you need to create as many opportunities as possible to get lucky. You can't win at dice if you never roll them.

Precisely. "Luck" shouldn't be equivocated with "chance." We have two words for a reason.

Show up + embrace awkwardness + be kind and courteous and luck will follow.

My son's Scout troop was lucky this year. They just sold more than $60k worth of pop-corn in two weeks. How? Each kid walked up to hundreds of complete strangers at grocery stores and asked politely - albeit awkwardly sometimes. The exponentially lower-success approach is to sit behind a table waiting for people to hand you money.

The result? Almost 40 lucky kids get 11 all-expenses-paid camping trips and a fun summer camp all for just eight hours of walking and talking. Doesn't matter how much money their families make; every kid gets to fully participate.

He sure was lucky to be white. Do you think he could have rolled the dice if he was shackled up?

What a cynical and dismissive take, of no value to anyone.

Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?

There is truth in saying working harder does seem to generate more luck, in so far as, if you lay in your room all day and did nothing, you won't be getting any luck.

It's just silly to paint yourself as this hard worker that got back what you put in, whilst ignoring the ills that you put in. I'm sure he did good stuff because of work he personally did, but it's laughable to think he could get to where he did, if he wasn't born into the planter class.

And no, that doesn't mean if you were culturally disadvantaged you couldn't do anything, it's just a lot harder and you had no free will in that. Every opportunity (and decision, really) is just a consequence of where and when you are, and should be taken not as a personal character assessment. I guess you could argue that means Jefferson is morally fine because that's just the kinda life he was born into so how would he know different, or maybe he just lacks some empathy :P

Of course less famous people also had good work ethics we just don’t have their quotes immortalized.

So all you’ve really done is subsumed any discussion of the merits of the idea itself into a hand-wringing fest about privilege that was inevitable from the beginning and could equally apply to any famous quote from history. I really don’t see the value in this kind of hand-wringing.

I can see it being reasonable to assume the ROI of hard work while in shackles to be insufficient. Well, at least hard work that does not involve getting violent against the shacklers.

For example, would slave women have done the hard work of having and raising slave children if they had the agency to not have them?

Would you work hard at doing something that doesn't scale if you know the federal government will simply reduce the purchasing power of your earnings to maintain asset owners' position in society?

Does it make sense to work hard if there is a high likelihood you will never own land, and hence will always have increasing portions of your winnings taken by a rent seeker? Seems like a bad trade.

Here’s a good idea about Luck Surface Area https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

Right. I would say the most apt analogy is from poker.

In Poker, luck plays an integral role in the outcome of any specific game or match, but skill does show up when collected over a large enough sample (that's why they say you can't prove something is due to skill over chance until you've collected a sample of 10,000 - 100,000 played hands of poker - at least if you're playing online).

You could also be a very good poker player and have bad luck on one important occasion (say in the finals of the WSOP), where the outcome hinges purely on luck. Similarly, you could be a subpar player and "luck out" and strike it big purely because of the right sequence of cards at a big event. But generally, most people who succeed at Poker are not there purely based on luck; you can be lucky once or twice, but you're unlikely to make it through a whole Poker career just by being lucky.

I think similarly in life - you have a certain hand you're dealt, and if you play it to the best of your ability (and make opportunities for yourself), you increase your odds of winning the hand / the tournament / life; but ultimately even with your best efforts the outcome could still be decided by luck.