You can increase the surface area for luck by cultivating your curiosity
Date created: 2023-07-10
You never know when or how luck will appear, but you can prepare by having curiosity about a number of different things. Having the list of favourite problems is one example, but so is reading widely and Keep a list of important problems and test new ideas against them.
So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
You can enable Cross-pollination if you read across multiple fields:
It also helps to travel in topic space. You’ll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas. (View Highlight)