This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 284, an excerpt from the book Hustle, by Neil Patel, Patrick Vaskovitz, and Jonas Koeffler. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your Optimal Life awaits. Now, here's your host, Justin Mullick.
What's going on, oldies? Do not worry, I'm not calling you old. I'd like to refer to you as an oldie since OLD stands for Optimal Living Daily, and I'm Justin Mullick. So, today is one of those rare days when I read a book to you.
I actually read some of this book to you exactly one week ago in Episode 277, so if you enjoy this reading, you can hear more of their book for free if you listen to that episode, too. I did make a mistake in that episode, and I said that the book wasn't released yet. It wasn't when I recorded the episode, but it was released by the time the episode went live, so yeah, this book is now available, and by the way, the book is called Hustle. I haven't mentioned that yet, and the authors of this book are incredibly smart guys, and I'm really happy that I get to read it to you.
That's enough of an intro, so let's start my audiobook version of it and start optimizing your life. The Science of Luck, from the book Hustle, by Neil Patel, Patrick Vaskovitz, and Jonas Koeffler. It is a commonly held belief that luck, chance, and good fortune are entirely random events or even manifestations of some mystical force. In this way of thinking, some people are just luckier than others.
This worldview is captured in things like Right Place Right Time, or It's Better to Be Lucky Than Good, or Count Your Lucky Stars. We take a different tack. The work of neuroscientist Dr. James Austin suggests that there are four distinct types of luck.
By simply hustling, moving, and doing, we can harvest more good fortune and capture serendipity more regularly. Dr. Austin's classifications of luck fall into these categories, which we recryst in the parlance of hustlers. Type 1, Random Luck.
This is what many people call dumb luck, the kind that happens without any effort or influence on your part. Think of it as a gift. Your 45 minutes late and you cringe as you pull into an overcrowded parking lot at a hit music festival. As Florence and the Machine rock the stage, you and 3,000 of your closest friends circle the tiny dirt lot slowly, stocking open parking spots.
Hopelessly, you turn a corner and find a wide open empty spot right next to the concert entrance with an area car in sight. You squeal like a two and a half year old on Christmas Day as you cannot believe your luck. Type 2, Hustle Luck. This is the kind of luck that's created by your momentum and motion.
Like 4 year old Shane, when we stop standing still and stir up the pot, random ideas are able to surface, get mashed up together, and recombine in new, interesting ways. One of them will lead to success in solving various everyday challenges or achieving goals. A conversation at a coffee shop leads to a job interview. Your self-published book brings you a traditional book deal.
You call up a customer and they're inspired by your knowledge, requesting you to do private consulting work with their team. In Neil's case, striking up conversations with random people and the elevators at the Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas, where he owns a condo, led to multiple quote unquote lucky business deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Neil could have, like most people, remained elevator mute, doing his best to avoid eye contact and conversation with his fellow passengers, but instead Neil made an effort to connect with the people around him, and naturally his enthusiasm for his work came spilling out because it's so integral to who he is. That's how hustle luck works.
Don't wait for certainty before taking action. Do something. Anything. Most important is movement.
Don't ruminate. For hustle luck, even random motion is better than standing still. Think of the expression, you've got to be in it to win it. Type 3.
Hidden luck. These are the camouflage opportunities that silently tip toe in and out of your life each and every day, unnoticed by the unlocking, unlucky. This kind of luck can be summed up by the saying, chance favors only the prepared mind. It's a luck that is generated by creative synthesis of past experiences.
It evolves into the realization that you are the only one who understands an open secret. Much of this sort of luck depends on how well-prepared you are in your field of inquiry, trade, or discipline, and how sensitive and open you are to changes in the world. It's surprisingly easy to train yourself to keep your eyes open for opportunity. One of the most visible modern examples of a hustler using hidden luck is Storyteller Casey Neistat.
Casey is a high school dropout who today enjoys what seems like a blessed career, creating incredible branded videos for clients such as Nike, Mercedes-Benz, and Google, while simultaneously growing a loyal audience of millions on YouTube. His distinctive funny video storytelling is an honest reflection of himself, one that is built on his unabashed love for filmmaking. In his words, quote, I have 60 plus videos on YouTube and over 30 million views. As though 60, only three or four are branded videos.
I built that audience by telling stories the way I like to tell them, unquote. Before finding success on YouTube with his viral videos, some of which individually boast up to 17 million views, Casey was just another poorly paid videographer hustling for jobs in New York City, shooting weddings, graduations, kids' birthday parties, anything that involved picking up a camera. In 2006, Casey and his brother Van filmed a few videos for a man named Tom Scott. Tom fell in love with their work and financed a project for the Neistat brothers to create eight 25-minute episodes about their lives.
When Casey subsequently sold that show to HBO for $2 million, he had come across a major inflection point in his career. Casey himself claims that meeting Tom and creating the show was just luck, and is remarked, quote, luck is where opportunity meets preparation, unquote. We agree, but it's even more than that. Casey didn't come across this inflection point.
His hustle created it. It's the fourth type of luck, quirky luck. Type 4, quirky luck. This is the type of luck that seeks you out because of your inherent weirdness.
Many biographers of the famous and infamous have commented on their subjects' eccentricities or odd personal lifestyles. For example, Albert Einstein was known to play as violin as a bird-watched crying all the while. Charles Dickens combed his hair hundreds of times a day. Benjamin Franklin took daily nude air baths.
Casey Neistat, quite frankly, is an all-looking guy with a square jaw, a boxer's nose, and coarse kinky hair. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Bill from the 1980s goofball film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Casey does goofball things, too, like sneaking into a German water park at 2 AM, or flying 27 hours across the world from New York City to Cape Town, South Africa to surprise his then-girlfriend, now-wife Candace, unannounced and recording the entire incident on a video to be shared on YouTube. We scratch our heads and laugh at these funny courts now, understanding that these odd habits are a differentiating feature, not a bug.
It's not that these people became successful and lucky despite their odd habits, it's because of their odd habits that they've enjoyed certain idiosyncratic successes. When hustle luck and hidden luck hook up, quirky luck is born. When people do seemingly strange things, they sense, encounter, and accept novel, strange luck. If you have quote-unquote weird interests or odd habits not understood by the conformance status quo, indulge them, don't rein them in.
When you embrace who you are, what you do, and how you are different, you leverage your energy, your hustle to create a powerful, organic momentum. Compare that to the energy drain someone experiences trying to fit into a landlord's mold. So go ahead, let your freak flag fly. We promise that you'll get luckier.
First thing that luck is, to a greater or lesser extent, a constant in life, should give you some solace and maybe even some relief. Every day is an opportunity for you to make luck happen when you harness your skills, your persistence, and your commitment to your dream. As Casey Neistat himself has reflected, quote, the first two decades of my life were spent being told I was wrong, not fitting in, but this last decade of my life, you know those days when you're in a rush to get somewhere and you catch every green light, that's what it's felt like. I'm 33 years old and I have no intention of slowing down, unquote.
If Albert Einstein, Francis Ford Coppola, Shane, and Casey Neistat batted lead off through cleanup on a baseball team, they might be the best or worst hitters in the history of the major leagues. Here's a surprising truth about luck, it doesn't matter either way, as long as they keep swinging, good things are likely to happen. You just listened to an excerpt from the book Hustle by Neil Patel, Patrick Laskovitz, and Jonas Cofler. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on.
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And the book is on Amazon, and it was last week, sorry if I confused you, but if you went to look it up, I'm sure you figured it out. And tomorrow looks like I'll be reading a post from Angel of Market Angel, a massively successful personal development blog, so stay tuned for that, where your optimal life awaits.