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How To Attract Luck: The Science Behind How People Get Luck

taylorpearson.me · 2,728 words · saved by 1 readers

Almost everyone systematically under-allocates resources to the fat tails. We tend to spend most of our time and energy thinking about the middle, because we see the world through a bell curve lens, and most of the area in a bell curve is in the middle. But in reality, we live in an 80/20 world, where the top 1% of fat tails account for 50% of the results. The people who understand this seem to attract luck, but really they’ve just adopted the 80/20 curve model.

There are at least two overarching mental models for looking at the world: One could be called the bell curve and the other, the 80/20 curve. When I was marketing my book, The End of Jobs , I spent a week sending personal emails (in Gmail, one by one, not in bulk) to two hundred people who I thought could potentially be in the top 1% of my readers, the people most excited about the book. In total, I spent about 50% of my marketing resources on 1% of readers. One of the two hundred people happened to have a friend who had a large community of people interested in business books. He introduced u

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