Luck as a matter of attention and attempts

The psychologist Richard Wiseman once handed volunteers a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs in it. On the second page, in large type, a notice told readers they could stop counting and gave the answer. People who described themselves as unlucky tended to miss it and kept counting; people who called themselves lucky were more likely to see it. Wiseman described the work in The Luck Factor (2003), and his conclusion was that a good part of what people call luck is attention to chances already in front of them.

Hiten Shah, who co-founded the analytics companies Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics with Neil Patel, puts the same idea in a founder’s terms. The sentence circulated under his name in 2011; its original setting was not traced. Its practical meaning is about surface area. A founder who ships more experiments, talks to more customers and answers more emails has more places for a useful accident to land, and one who watches the results closely is more likely to notice when one does.

A recent example makes the point. The founders of Burbn, a check-in app, noticed that its users mostly ignored the check-ins and shared photos. They cut nearly everything else, and the result launched in October 2010 as Instagram. Outsiders will call that a lucky break. It came from building something, watching how it was used, and acting on a pattern others might have filed away as a curiosity.

The line overreaches in its second sentence. Much luck is not made at all. Timing decides which companies meet a rising market and which meet a closing one, and nobody chooses the year they are ready to start. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008) popularized research showing that elite Canadian hockey players were disproportionately born early in the year, because age cutoffs gave them a head start in youth leagues. Effort after that point mattered, but the advantage was handed out by the calendar.

There is also a survivorship problem. For every founder who worked relentlessly and got a break, others worked just as hard and did not, and their stories rarely become quotations. And “every single minute” is a poor instruction taken literally. Exhausted people notice less, which undoes the attention the first sentence depends on.

What survives is still useful. Increase the number of honest attempts, look closely at what each one shows, and treat surprises as information rather than noise. That raises the odds. It does not guarantee the outcome, and a founder who believes it does will misread a run of bad luck as a personal failure.