The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.

Luck = Doing x Telling

When you pour energy into a passion, you develop expertise. The value of this is compounded by people seeing and recognising that expertise. This increases the chances of people acting upon that value: hiring you, investing in you, etc.

Passion is infectious: the more you do and share, the higher the number of people pulled into your orbit.

Some people tend to be "doing" biased while others are "telling" biased. The trick is to balance the two.

In relation to work

Show not just complete projects but also work in progress. Learning in public is more valuable than creating in isolation and finding flaws.

Vincent Van Gogh recognised a “doing” bias in his own life when he wrote the following in a letter to his brother Theo:

"One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever comes to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way."

The cartography of ambition relates to this because you can expand your Luck Surface Area by nurturing ambient ambitions and then maturing them into applied ambition.