how to use dumb luck — a method i refined accidentally

how to use dumb luck is a method i refined accidentally over years of putting forks where forks should not go. the diy haircut helped. the single airpod helped. the microwave plate, spinning in the only direction it knows, helped most of all. luck is mostly a vector, dumbly aimed.

which means, statistically, anybody can do this. you don’t need a system. you don’t need a planner. you need a tuesday, a few small decisions made without thinking, and the willingness to show up when the universe decides to be generous for ninety seconds.

i am writing this at 1:42pm on a thursday from my desk on the second floor. carla is upstairs at an annual planning meeting. i have, give or take, the rest of the lunch hour to lay out the method, which i am calling, in a generous mood, a method.

the topic, broadly, is the cluster called dumb, and inside that cluster i am the unpaid intern of a sub-discipline that goes by the polite name of accident-based achievement. i did not invent it. i refined it. there is a difference. it is the difference between writing a song and being there when somebody else hums one and getting credited because you nodded at the right moment.

1. dumb luck, the prerequisites

before you can use dumb luck, you need to lower the floor. you need to make a series of decisions so unremarkable that any positive outcome looks, in retrospect, like a miracle. this is not pessimism. this is calibration.

the prerequisites are three. first, you have to be doing something mildly inadvisable. second, you have to not be paying full attention. third, the outcome has to find you, not the other way around. if you are looking for it, it is no longer dumb luck. it is, at best, a hobby.

i learned the prerequisites through trial. mostly trial. very little error, technically, because error implies you knew the right answer. i did not know the right answer. i had a kettle, a fork, an opinion, and a tuesday. that is the lab.

the universe, as a rule, doesn’t reward effort the way the calendar on the wall in human resources implies it does. the universe rewards presence. if you are at the right desk, in the right chair, holding a lukewarm mug, with one airpod in your ear, the universe sometimes — sometimes — drops a small useful thing on your head. the only correct response is to pick it up and pretend you meant for it to land there.

2. step one, lose one airpod, keep the other

the first ritual of dumb luck is to be operating at half-capacity on purpose. for me, this means i have one airpod in my ear and one — i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere on this — under a piece of furniture i bought in 2019 and have not moved since.

this is not a bug. this is the method. with one airpod, i can hear the phone. i can hear carla coming down the corridor. i can hear the microwave in the kitchenette do its post-button hum. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford, and i have made peace with it. the world arrives in mono now, and the parts of it that matter are still in there, just flatter.

the side effect, which is also the main effect, is that i miss things. i miss small things. i miss the second half of jokes at the desk pod. i miss what stefan-the-wine-guy said about acidity. i miss what mike has a system for taxes was about to add at the bar. but i also miss the things that would have made me overthink, and overthinking is the principal enemy of dumb luck. nothing kills a good accident like a plan.

3. step two, the diy haircut that improved a meeting

the second ritual is the haircut. specifically, the haircut you give yourself in your apartment with a pair of clippers a friend left in 2021 and a youtube tutorial you only half watch. i did this on a wednesday. it was a mistake. and it was the best mistake of the quarter.

the cut was uneven. one side was, by my own measurement, two centimeters shorter than the other. i looked, depending on the angle, like a man who had survived something mildly nautical. i went into a vendor walkthrough the next morning expecting comment. there was no comment. there was only a long pause from the senior person across the table, followed by the words “you look like you mean business”. the meeting moved forward at twice the usual speed. a decision was made. the decision benefited me.

the haircut had nothing to do with it. or it had everything to do with it. i cannot tell. that is the point. dumb luck does not show its work. you submit the inputs and you accept the outputs and you do not, under any circumstances, ask follow-up questions.

tom, who lives in a real house with a volvo and a wife and a pension that he understands, gets his hair cut by a man named carlos who has been doing it for nine years. tom has never had a meeting move twice as fast because of his hair. tom has had many meetings. none of them have moved. you tell me which method scales.

4. step three, the microwave that did not catch fire this time

the third ritual is to use the microwave with measured optimism. the microwave plate doesn’t need to spin, technically — i hold this view, and i will defend it at the bar with mike if mike is willing to listen, which mike usually is, because mike has a system for taxes and very few opinions about kitchen rotation — but it does spin, and the spinning is, if you are paying attention, a small lottery you run several times a day.

i have killed seven microwaves. i mention this not to brag, although it is the closest thing to a record i hold, but to point out that the eighth has, against all available data, lasted four months. four months. that is a presidential term in microwave years.

i have done nothing different. i still put metal-adjacent things near it. i still stand in front of it in mild defiance of the printed warnings. and yet, every morning, it heats my coffee in 47 seconds and emits no sparks. nothing about my behavior earned this. it is not improvement. it is dumb luck, in microwave form, and i intend to enjoy it for as long as it lasts, which is to say, until i forget myself and put a fork in there because the fork was right there and the part of my brain that knows things took a small break.

somewhere in this list, you are supposed to feel the dunning-kruger effect arriving on a small donkey. you are supposed to think: this man overrates his own competence. that is, statistically, what’s happening. you are correct. you are also missing the point. the point is that the eighth microwave is alive and i had nothing to do with it, and that, friend, is the thesis.

5. step four through six, the snooze that aligned with the bus

the fourth ritual is the 9-min snooze. specifically, the version where you set the alarm for 7:21am, hit snooze once, and end up leaving the apartment at exactly the moment the 14 bus pulls up to the corner. this has happened to me eleven times. i have logged them on the back of an envelope from a stack of letters i don’t open. eleven.

the fifth ritual is showing up anyway. you would be amazed how often the result you wanted is just sitting in the room you assumed nobody would be in. the trick is to walk in. the trick is also not to ask why you walked in. the trick, in fact, is to have no trick.

the sixth ritual, which is really a corollary of the first five, is to keep showing up. the people who win at dumb luck are not lucky. they are persistent in a way that looks, from the outside, like idleness. they are at the desk. they are in the chair. they are in the kitchenette at 8:14am with a mug. they are not strategizing. they are present. and the universe, when it has a small useful thing to drop, drops it on whoever is standing under the chute.

SHOW UP. STAY DUMB. ACCEPT WHAT SPINS.

this, i think, also explains a thing or two i once read about a british person being shipped to inconvenient countries, the entire premise of which was that karl pilkington abroad would be funny because he didn’t want to be there. an idiot, abroad, getting on with it. the show is a documentary about my method, ten years before i had the method. the persistence is the joke. the persistence is also, structurally, the win. there is a related cluster on this site about being an idiot in foreign places, which i recommend if you have the rest of the lunch hour and a mild headache.

6. verdict, the method is to keep showing up

the verdict, then, is that dumb luck is a real method, and the method is mostly the part where you don’t have a method. you reduce the inputs. you let the plate spin. you take the haircut. you keep the one airpod. you snooze the alarm. you show up at 7:21am at the corner of the street. you stand under the chute and you wait, and you don’t read the certified letters, and you don’t open the bank app, and the universe, which has been keeping a list, occasionally drops a small useful thing.

does it work every day. it does not. does it work often enough to call it a method. it does, by my running tally, work approximately one tuesday in three, which is, in the long view, a much better hit rate than effort.

i am aware of how that sounds. i am also aware that this paragraph is the kind of thing that, if read by my mother on sunday, would get me a long pause and the sentence “you should call your brother”. i don’t have a brother. she knows this. mothers know everything. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated. i have tried.

so the manifesto, if you must have a manifesto — and apparently you must, because we keep having them — is short. show up. stay dumb. let the plate spin. accept the haircut. keep the one airpod. and when the small useful thing lands on your head at 8:47am on a thursday in the kitchenette, pick it up and pretend you meant it.