Luck Favors the Prepared Mind

Pasteur’s line - “luck favors the prepared mind” - sounds like generic advice, but there’s something real in it.

What looks like luck is often pattern recognition. You stumble across an opportunity, but only because you’d spent years building the context to recognize it as an opportunity.

Fleming “accidentally” discovered penicillin. A mold contaminated his petri dish and killed the bacteria. But he’d been studying antibacterial substances for years - that’s why he noticed what he was looking at instead of just throwing out the contaminated dish.

The preparation isn’t about predicting what opportunity will appear. It’s about being ready to recognize it when it does. You can’t plan for serendipity, but you can increase the surface area for it to find you.

This plays out in smaller ways constantly. The job opportunity you hear about through a connection you maintained. The problem you solve quickly because you’d read about a similar one years ago. The startup idea that seems obvious to you but not to others because of your specific background.

The implication: broad learning pays off in nonlinear ways. Things that seem useless often connect later. Stay curious, keep building context, and some of it will turn into “luck.”