Luck is The Residue of Design
Being about half a Mick, I’ve always been a fan of the saying: “If You’re Lucky Enough to Be Irish, You’re Lucky Enough.”
But what in our lives can we truly attribute to pure luck? And then how do we then distinguish luck from predictable randomness or movements of Providence?
Well, I ain’t totally sure where these blurred lines exist and where clarity might be found, but one perspective I tend to give the most weight to is the idea that LUCK IS THE RESIDUE OF DESIGN. Which, of course means, that much of what we casually call luck isn’t luck at all.
This concept is most attributable dually to the English poet John Milton—although no one can seems to validate this attribution—and then more widely to Wesley Branch Rickey, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who signed Jackie Robinson back in the 1940s.
Rickey himself was a man of design. He didn’t wait for some vague notion of luck to enter the orbit of his efforts. When Rickey hatched a vision, he followed through with decisive and strategic action. Action, that mobilized all the designs of his ambition and imagination. Rickey was the first to design a framework for the minor league baseball farm system we now know today. Seeing the unnecessary risk of players having exposed heads in the field, he was also the first to require players to wear helmets.
However, while Rickey rightly minimized luck and chose not to count on it, he still left at least just a lil’ bit of room for its existence.
He explained it this way:
“Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.”
If you’re plotting your way as an entrepreneur, a creative seeker of the truth, or a person striving to actualize your most authentic Being in the world, do not passively rely on luck or chance. Be intentional and design your path with as much specificity as possible. Let that design spin off its beneficial residue in due time.
One way to minimize failure and move forward with intentional design is to follow FAILURE RULE #4: Build Your Thing One and Thing Two Dependency, a strategy that leverages one or more enabler pursuits to move you toward a highest meaning North Star pursuit. This can be built in many ways.
Comedian Jim Norton—a man who once played Quiet Riot’s song “Cum On Feel The Noize” on a boombox in a girl’s ear on the school bus in an attempt to get her to like him— centered his occupational choices around preserving the design of his Thing One and Thing Two Dependency so he could achieve his Thing Two dream of becoming a full time comedian. Jim intuitively knew how important design was to the efficacy of FAILURE RULE #4.
It was discipline of design that helped him align with the fullness of his calling journey when he eventually actualized his dream to become a full-time comedian. Jim designed his career path in such a way to deliberately avoid any material distraction from his North Star Thing Two pursuit.
On the James Altucher Show podcast, Jim explained that because he was determined to become a full-time comedian—his Thing Two dream that aligned with his true self—he refused to allow himself to be exposed to any other job option that he might risk becoming attached to. Jobs that might cause him to lose his inner self. Jobs that might pull him away from the magnet of his Thing Two dream desire.
So instead of seeking out jobs that he might risk becoming comfortably complacent with, he chose dead-end jobs, grueling jobs, or jobs like driving a forklift, that allowed his mind to be free while doing them. Jim wanted his mind free so that he could continue to plot and scheme his course toward his Thing Two dream. Jim knew that luck is the residue of design.
Entrepreneur, creative, and drummer for Blink 182 and The Transplants, Travis Barker similarly designed his calling journey path in such a way to not count on luck as a factor. On an episode of the Rich Roll podcast, while promoting his book Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums, Travis recalled a pivotal point in he early adulthood in which his father explained to him how limiting his options would be if he continued to get tattooed. This was back before the more broader acceptance of tattoos existed that is now more common within the world’s power structures.
Travis’s dad was trying to deter Travis from unnecessarily limiting himself, but instead he actually convinced him of the value of intentionally limiting himself. You see, Travis heard his dad loud and clear and deliberately decided that if he wanted to make a living as a drummer he would need to slam as many other doors shut as possible that might tempt him to decrease his focus on his goal to become a professional drummer. So, in Travis’s mind, getting as many tattoos as his heart desired was a great way to limit his options and help him wholly focus on his Thing Two North Star pursuit of being a pro drummer. The long-tail residue of his design is evidenced in his robust success as drummer for Blink 182 and The Transplants. It is also evident in the residue of all the adjacent possibles he lurched into as he built a Portfolio of Pursuits around his drumming career — his clothing company FAMOUS STARS AND STRIPES, his reality show MEET THE BARKERS, his wellness products, and his record label DTA Records.
Legendary martial artist Bruce Lee understood the necessity of design in his approach to manifest his calling journey. Bruce was granularly specific in how he wrote down his goals and the methods by which he would vow to achieve them. He built-in trade-off assumptions and other hard and soft costs that he knew he would have to pay in order to abide by his design and reach his goals. This is a necessary part of a design-mentality that discounts luck.
Author of The Third Door, Alex Banayan, knows what Bruce Lee knew—that you must be painfully specific in documenting what you’re chasing and designing. AND you need to expect trade-offs and costs.
As a young man, Alex was suffering with directional confusion as he sat staring at the ceiling in his college dorm room. The son of Jewish Persian immigrants who fled Iran as refugees, Alex’s parents had high and very specific hopes for him. He jokes that he pretty much came out of the womb with MD stamped on his behind. But the tracked normality of the pre-med college curriculum and the subsequent life it promised just didn’t grip Alex. In fact, it pushed him away. It pushed him into viable adjacent possibles. Alex wanted to design a very different education path for himself in hopes of some very different residue benefits.
You see, somehow Alex found himself deeply curious about how those with unorthodox career paths found their hook into success. There was no college course that taught students how to think differently and forge their own career path in unorthodox ways. The ways that have led so many to greatness and uniqueness.
Alex thought of Bill Gates. How does a college dropout find success as an entrepreneur and then become, for a time, the richest person in the world?
He thought of Lady Gaga. How did she land her first record deal at nineteen years old, while waiting tables in New York City?
And Steven Spielberg. How did someone who was rejected from film school become the youngest major studio director in Hollywood history?
Alex became obsessed with this curiosity. And in his obsession with those who created unorthodox career paths with no formal blueprint to guide them, Alex did the same. He decided he was going to be the one to study such individuals and present their lessons and mindset to the world. This was Alex’s unorthodox path. This was what he calls the Third Door.
The Third Door is the door that someone can bust through when the front door is too crowded and the back door is open only to those with special, privileged access. As Alex describes it:
“It is the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen—there’s always a way.”
Alex went on to employ the Third Door approach to design his own unique path. First, he used a Third Door approach to get himself on The Price Is Right game show with Drew Carey. Then he used the Third Door approach to win on the show. The winnings then fueled his project.
He went on to Third Door his way into interviewing Bill Gates, Larry King, Steve Wozniak, Tim Ferriss, Larry King, Pitbull, Lady Gaga, and more. Never fulfilling his parents’ dream of him becoming a doctor, Alex took the Third Door by writing the book on it and building a career around educating others on how to find, and break through, their own Third Doors.
Alex knew that he couldn’t rely on luck to achieve his unique mission of Third Dooring his way into interviewing and writing about those who exemplified the Third Door mentality. So he meticulously designed his plan and became joined succinctly into his own unique calling journey. The world is full of doctors. There is only one guy who teaches the Third Door concept. And now the residue of Alex’s design continues to inspire people every day to bust through their own Third Doors.
Author of Those Who Remain, G. Michael Hopf, said that:
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
If this is true, it means that you have the powerful—like strong men forged by failure and hard times to create long-lasting good times, value, and prosperity. This is the residue of your designs that others can benefit from.
The challenge for all of us is to be strong and properly utilize the residue of the designs of others that we’ve been privileged to benefit from by going out and then creating more residue—to perpetuate the residual blessings of thoughtful design.
Else, the good times created by those strong people risks creating weak people that end up leaving no beneficial residue of their own.
So, be strong and leverage design and intent to overcome failure and hard times so you can leave long-lasting residue of blessings in your wake.
Because luck is the residue of design.