I’m not sure if you believe in miracles, luck, or serendipity, but all three of them struck one Sunday in a tiny Nebraska church in 1950.
It’s a cold March in Nebraska. We’re at the West Side Baptist Church. Choir practice starts at 7:15. The Reverend comes in a few hours early to put the furnace on so it’s not cold when everyone arrives. He sets everything up and goes home for dinner.
Choir practice starts at 7:15. At 7:25, a gas leak causes an explosion. The blast demolishes the church, destroys the windows of nearby buildings, and takes a nearby radio station off the air.
Every single one of the 15 choir members… survived. It turns out they were all running late. Each choir member had a different excuse. One was napping. Some were still eating dinner. One was waiting in the car to pick up another. One couple had to change their kids’ diapers.
This is the kind of miracle most people anticipate when they imagine luck. And yes, sometimes luck strikes like lightning. But most of the time, luck is like oil.
We like to think of luck as being like lightning—random, unpredictable, beyond our control. But most of the time, luck is like oil. It doesn’t just appear. You have to drill for it.
Luck lies dormant beneath the surface of everyday life, waiting to be discovered. Some people spend their entire lives wandering aimlessly, occasionally stumbling upon small pockets of good fortune. Others become prospectors, developing the tools and techniques to find luck consistently.
The worst entrepreneurs get lucky—the best ones build luck. They create systems that increase their exposure to positive randomness. They position themselves at the crossroads where opportunity tends to travel. They recognise patterns that others miss.
Consider how oil companies operate. They don’t randomly drill holes and hope for the best. They study geological formations. They use seismic imaging. They analyse data from previous discoveries. They know that finding oil isn’t random—it’s probabilistic. The more you seek, the more you find. And the better you get at seeking it, the more your returns will multiply.
Luck works the same way. It’s not evenly distributed across all circumstances and all people. It clusters around certain behaviours, certain mindsets, certain environments.
The more you network, the more likely you’ll meet someone who changes your career. The more you read widely, the more likely you’ll connect ideas in valuable ways. The more experiments you run, the more likely one will succeed beyond expectations.
Luck is only a coin toss until you get intentional about finding it. The more precisely you tune your life to detect opportunity beneath the surface, the more consistently you’ll strike it.
I can’t promise you’ll ever experience a single stroke of luck as dramatic as the choir members of the West Side Baptist Church. But in aggregate, over a lifetime of drilling in the right places, you could experience something even more valuable: consistent, compounding fortune.
The luckiest people you know hunt down serendipity like it’s buried gold. At scale, and over time, getting lucky is a skill.
Make the decision to get lucky today. Start drilling.
