My wife often says my favorite word is “serendipity,” and I can’t blame her I use that word a lot (😂). Probably too much. But there’s a good reason for my obsession. Heck the original title for this post was Compounding Serendipity, but I don’t think you would have clicked on it if the title was that boring, so I had to go with something more interesting.
I think about serendipity a lot because I’m a living proof of its power. I’m an immigrant who grew up poor but somehow ended up in the U.S and in Tech through sheer serendipity. So you could say I’m an opportunist by nature. In everything I do that has financial upside, I’m always thinking about how to make lady luck work for me.
I recently screenshotted this cool quote that I think really highlights my obsession with the word, or at least why I think it’s so powerful.
As the photo above highlights: 0 visibility * 100 skill = 0 opportunities.
It’s a simple but brutally effective formula. I know what you’re thinking “that doesn’t seem right”. Why does the output default to 0? Bear with me. Before we talk about multipliers (levers), let’s first reason about why most of us don’t usually think like this.
If you’re like me, you probably grew up with the “be so good they can’t ignore you” mantra. I can rant on and on about how we were brainwashed with the Work hard, master your craft, and the world will beat a path to your door step philosophy. It’s a comforting idea because it suggests that merit alone determines our success. But like many comforting ideas, it’s incomplete.
The problem isn’t that competence and excellence doesn’t matter, it absolutely does actually. But as i said in the last paragraph it’s an incomplete equation if you don’t add the key multiplier of visibility as a constant to your success formula. If we use AI Slop to analogize the point am trying to make, we get this:
Competence without visibility is like having the world’s best restaurant in a basement with no sign. You might serve incredible food to the handful of people who stumble upon you, but you’ll never feed the thousands who would love what you’re making.
What that AI generated analogy is hinting at is that even if you manage to achieve some breakthrough success through pure skills alone, you’ll still be leaving exponential upside on the table if you’re not visible enough in your domain.
In today’s digital age the smartest people are not just excellent at their craft, they’ve also figured out a way to make their excellence visible to the right crowd. They’ve effectively learned how to compound serendipity.
The Two Ingredients for Success
Success in our modern digital age, comes down squarely to 2 things:
1. Doing something valuable. As Paul Graham says, “make something people want”.
This part is obvious to anyone who’s remotely ambitious. The TL;DR is that you need skills that can generate outcomes that others care about (excluding your mom, dad and siblings. Sorry they don’t count 😂_).
2. Make sure people know you exist. This is where most people fall short, we have all probably heard some variation of point 1 but for reason everyone thinks this 2nd point is reserved exclusively for influencers. They do all the hard work of becoming excellent at their craft but then they skip the leverage that comes from being known for that excellence. It’s not enough for value to exist, it has to be discovered. It’s 2025, the world is a digital village, the people who want what you’re offering need to know you exist and they need to know you’ve the solutions to their problem.
Again, this is no longer an exclusive thing for influencers. This isn’t about vanity or ego, It’s plain math. And the math is simple, if you can deliver value and the right people know about it, money + opportunities will come. The size of both will depend on how well you can execute the 2 ingredients above.
The Art of Selling Yourself (Your Skills)
If What am saying sounds like marketing, it’s because it is. Am effectively telling you, you need to market yourself else you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table.
The trick to digital self promotion is to make it not feel like self promotion. Like they say, the best sales is the one that doesn’t feel like sales.
So how do we sell ourselves without coming off as your typical sleezy car sales man?
Well, we go back to ingredient one: you provide something of value, but you do it publicly and for free.
This is digital self promotion 101. It’s really just content marketing your skills, with a pinch of personal brand attached to it. You need to show people how to solve problems in your domain and you need to build a reputation around creating value for free through those content and then here’s the fun part, watch the inbound opportunities roll in (I promise it works, you’ll have to take my word for it).
Why does it work? Well it works because it attracts the exact kind of people who need what you’re selling, and your content makes them trust you before they even do business with you. A good example of this at scale is Alex Hormozi.
When someone has been reading your articles, or watching your videos and tutorials, for months, hiring you or doing business with you stops feeling like a gamble. It just becomes inevitable especially if you’re teching them how to solve the problems they have.
The Best Engine for Serendipity
Content marketing creates what I call a serendipity engine. Every piece of content you publish is like casting a net into an ocean of potential opportunities. You never know which piece will catch on, and that’s the beauty of it.
The compound effect is remarkable. Early on, you might create 10 pieces of content for every 1 meaningful connection. But as your reputation grows, the ratio flips. Eventually, a single great post can generate dozens of inbound opportunities or business for you.
Even massive corporations understand this power. Billion-dollar companies are out here running podcasts and YouTube channels not because they need the ad revenue, but because they understand the multiplicative effect of being known for providing value in a given domain. If it works for them, imagine what it can do for you as an individual.
The New Unfair Advantage
Here’s what most people miss: in a world where everyone has access to the same tools and information, being known as an expert in your domain becomes the ultimate differentiator. 2 people with identical skills will have vastly different career trajectories if one builds a reputation and the other doesn’t.
The person with visibility gets the interesting projects, the speaking opportunities, or the job offers they never applied for. They get first pick of collaborators and customers. They get to choose from a menu of inbound opportunities instead of scrapping for whatever’s available.
Even if you’re just a W2 employee with no entrepreneurial drive you can still benefit from the visibility that content marketing can provide your career. Every 6 figure tech job I’ve landed has been an inbound opportunity, either with a recruiter seeing my content on linkedIn or videos on youtube or one of my blog articles. The point is, being visible in your domain matters.
And to be clear this isn’t just about making more money, though you will. It’s about having more choices, more interesting problems to solve, and more control over the direction of your career.
The formula works because it scales. Your skills might improve linearly with effort, but your opportunities can grow exponentially with visibility. A single piece of content can reach thousands of people. A viral post can reach millions. The asymmetric upside is enormous.
Think Big but Start Small
The beauty of this approach is that you can start immediately. You don’t need a huge following or fancy equipment. You just need to know something valuable and be willing to share it.
Write about problems you’ve solved. Create tutorials for things you’ve learned. Share insights from your work. Document your process. The key is consistency, not perfection.
Remember you’re not trying to teach people everything. You’re just trying to demonstrate that you know something worth knowing. Every expert was once a beginner as they say, but not every beginner documents their journey.
I will leave you with this: The internet rewards people who are helpful, consistent, and authentic. It punishes people who are invisible.
100 skill × 1 visibility = 100 opportunities. 100 skill × 10 visibility = 1,000 opportunities.
The math is simple. The only question is whether you’re willing to do the work to multiply your opportunities.