turns out, reading voraciously, moving your body, loving people without keeping score, protecting your solitude, chasing nothing but your own growth, and occasionally staying out too late with people who make you laugh until it hurts is not a bad way to build a life.
There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.
He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.
When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.
Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.
The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.
Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.
The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.
That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.
I'm old enough to remember when Tebow first blew up at Florida. Always thought he had to have been hiding some big secret bc there's just no way anybody is really that good of a person.
20 years later he is the only guy I can think of who was built up by the media to be a saint and has actually lived up to it. Also has a higher playoff passer rating than Tom Brady.
🇯🇵 Meanwhile in Japan
Japanese engineers created floating water pearls using frequencies.
Many people subscribed to the theory that frequencies were used broadly in old technology lost to us, for example that the construction of the pyramids.