Systematic Lucky Breaks

Martial arts: Like dancing it teaches you to be better at coordinating your body. It also helps you with your confidence when you are interacting with males. If you know in the back of your mind that you could beat the other people up you are going to be more confident. Evolutionary psychology suggests that we should have more confidence when dealing with people we can beat up and less if they would beat us up. One of the effects is that tall people make more money and many US presidents are really tall people

I don't know enough about martial arts to tell you which one is best. My evaluation criteria in order of importance:

• Low risk of serious injuries
• It includes fights, that trigger evolutionary fears and allow you to overcome them as a form of exposure therapy
• It increases your ability to coordinate your own body.
• It's useful for actually defending yourself
• It's sport for cardiovascular purposes
• It builds muscles

Body work: It gives you more awareness of your body.

• Feldenkrais Method,
• Alexander Method
• Somato-Psychoeducation (unfortunately there not much English material published about the last one, most of the material is in French and a little bit translated into German). The three I mentions are 20th century methods. I would recommend them over something like Yoga. The reasons for that recommendation are complex, so I don't want to enumerate them all at this point.

Communcation frameworks:

• Nonviolent communcation is a framework that can help you communicate about your needs with other people.
• Improv Comedy is a activity that teaches you to be more spontanously fun and being able to make quick jokes.
• NLP is a mental framework for changing mental patterns. It's full of people with the "tsuyoku naritai" trait.
• Somato-Psychoeducation

The fact that Julia Galef lately wrote that she found within her CFAR work that emotions are more important for rationality than she previously thought should encourage you further to engage into any of the activities I listed.

Unfortunately none of the area that I mentioned have a strong scientifically backed theoretic framework. They are the result of tinkering. People tried different things and looked at the results. I think that's okay. In some sense the same goes for CFAR. Hopefully CFAR will publish evidence that their approach works in the future but at the moment it doesn't exist. On the other hand the techniques that I listed have a longer history and people invested more time into tinkering with them and optimizing them.

As you are dancing, doing any kind of body work will have a payoff of being a better dancer.

Some more ideas:

• One great way to meet more awesome people is to explicitly mention this goal to your existing awesome friends and ask them to introduce you to other growth-oriented people.

• Figure out what situations led you to the good friendships you have, and recreate those. In my case I found that nearly all my great friendships started with interactions/events of two hours or more. There are several reasons why this might be true (familiarity, more time to find common interests, people engaged in long conversations will have more time to socialize), but the application was to structure my socializing more around a few longer events (e.g. game nights) and less around short social events.

• Do you feel like you're dancing enough to get the fun & social benefits? If not, it's probably worth setting up a system that lets you dance more, e.g. by going to dance events.

• It sounds like the criterion for useful skills is "impress people in social situations". There are a wide class of skills that could address this, such as juggling, martial arts, public speaking, improv, hosting events, and telling jokes/comedy. Since you've already shown facility with kinesthetic skills, juggling or martial arts may be a good way to proceed.

Okay, let's try it. One event that improved my life in a positive way was learning to dance. It allowed me to have fun and impress girls by my skills in various social situations. So I guess I should dance more, or learn other forms of dance (square dance?), or more meta... are there other skills similar to dancing that I should learn? Not sure what exactly those skills would be: playing a musical instrument? singing?

People can't reliably tell levels far above their own apart, so once you are a couple standard deviations above the mean (of the population you want to impress) in a given skill you'll hit diminishing returns in terms of impressiveness and you'd better divert the effort expenditure to a different skill. (Also, being awesome at several different skills is itself impressive, whereas being awesome at only one of them is more likely to be dismissed as just having too much time on your hands and probably spending five hours a day practising.)

Agree that this is similar. Wiseman focuses on the idea that keeping an open mind and noticing good opportunities is a major part of what people see as luck. I'd like to take that one step further and get people to actually systematize these good opportunities, so they can experience them repeatedly.

I'm confused as to why people are voting it up.

Speaking for myself: It is a simple actionable advice, and although it seems obvious in hindsight, people like me don't follow it automatically.

I am not sure, maybe some people are doing this automatically, but for me it is not a usual way of thinking to 1) list the good things in my life, 2) find the situations that created them, and 3) try to replicate those situations. Sometimes, very rarely, I do the first part, and maybe with one very specific situation I tried the second and the third parts. Okay, the third part may be difficult, if the situation was exceptional. But the first two parts you can do any moment you have five minutes of free time.

The discussion moved to specific topics (martial arts), because I gave a specific example of my life and asked for ideas how to apply this advice. (The further discussion about martial arts is going away from the original topic.) I think it would be nice if other people who upvoted would give specific examples from their lives that the article resonated with (assuming they upvoted for similar reasons).

I'm not sure how a "game night" qualifies as an "unexpected positive event". Surely game makers are aware that games are positive experiences for people...

For a person who is not an organizer and not a part of regularly-meeting community, the unexpected thing could be that they were invited. Imagine that you were invited to a game night, and you liked it. But for whatever reasons you don't get invited again (for example the original organizers stopped doing it). Most people would just say: "oh, it was so good, too bad it doesn't happen anymore". But the recommended reaction would be to organize another game yourself (or manipulate someone else to do so).

Another unexpected aspect could be that you go to the game night, and you just expect to spend a few nice hours without further consequences. But what may really happen is that you find good friends who later give you a lot of value even outside of the gaming context. In that case, most people would just say: "I was lucky to find this friend". But the recommended reaction would be to re-classify game night from "amusement" category to "opportunity to meet good friends" category.

What do the examples have to do with "luck"?

At least 2 of the initial occurrences-the game night working so well and happening to hear about an important market trend-were not caused by any deliberate action on my part. They were basically random and unexpected. Systematizing them and making them continue to happen was not luck, but that's the point of the post.

My understanding of luck is a situation where the circumstances "break" in your favor regardless of your attention or intention, or even in opposition to most likely outcome. (e.g. I was lucky not to get injured when X happened and many poeple around me were injured.)

People frequently refer to one-off positive events as "lucky breaks", which is why I used that phrase. But I don't care about the word luck specifically. The point of the post is to take one-off positive events or things that worked unexpectedly well and make them happen repeatedly and automatically.

What I see described in this post is something much closer to my concept of "common sense". Is there some very valuable and novel aspect to the content I am overlooking?

Most people don't respond to positive events by setting them up to happen automatically and repeatedly in their lives. The lesson is not "do things you enjoy", it's "take something that worked really well and set it up so that it happens consistently without conscious effort on your part."

Very few people respond to an unexpected positive event with "now I'll set up a system to make this happen repeatedly." Humans are generally good at repeatedly doing things that they intentionally tried and worked well, but not good at spotting the things that happened without effort on their part, but which could be copied and repeated. The game night is again a good example-I didn't set up the initial game night, somebody else did. But I noticed that I enjoyed the game night a lot and got a lot of value out of it, so I set up a repeating game night at my apartment every two weeks.

I encourage people to focus on the "lucky breaks", because those are common blind spots. Another important factor was taking a systematic approach ("let's set up a repeating biweekly game night") as opposed to an effortful approach ("I should attend more game nights.")