Postcard: Lucky
No. 008 - on serendipity and fortune.
Postcard is a weekly curation of things I think are beautiful or interesting. Each postcard will be named after a word and contain something to listen to, something to look at, and something to think about. I welcome you to share any thoughts in the comments. Thank you!
Postcard: Lucky
lucky:
(adj.) Bringing, or regarded as bringing, good luck; auspicious.
(adj.) Of a person: (originally) successful, prosperous; (in later use) having or enjoying good luck, favoured by good fortune, fortunate.
(adj.) Of an event or circumstance. Occurring by chance and resulting in a favourable outcome; fortuitous.
(adj.) Of a person: useful, handy. (Obsolete)
†Meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
Something to listen to:
I’ve been greatly enjoying this multi-instrument rearrangement of the Balatro theme by Luke Pickman, aka InstrumentManiac on YouTube.
If you wish to listen to the (similarly excellent) original version of the theme from the game, you can do so here on YouTube or Spotify.
Something to look at:
Something to think about:
LocalThunk, the pseudonymous indie developer behind the poker-based video game Balatro, recently published a timeline outlining the entire development cycle of his game from first conception to its release in 2024. It’s a fascinating read for many reasons, as it tells a gripping story about following your passion, about iterating and adapting and following the unexpected twists in the road when they appear, as well as the relationship between expectations and pressure, between hard work and health. It’s a beautiful and humanizing story about a creator chasing—or, perhaps, being possessed by—that essential artistic feeling: obsession.
What’s missing from his timeline, though, is the long-scale success of his creation. As of January 2025, Balatro sold over 5 million copies. It was nominated for many industry awards and won “Game of the Year” at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards (outcompeting games created by massive studios with 100x the resources and manpower). To call it a breakaway hit is an undersell; the success of the game has unlocked generational wealth for its creator and touched many, many lives. Of the ~110,000 player reviews for the game currently on Steam, 98% of them are positive.
My favorite part about the development of Balatro is the backstory of the game’s soundtrack. As a solo developer, LocalThunk knew he would need to hire someone to compose music for his game. Fate and search algorithms led him to Luis Clemente, aka LouisF on fiverr, a freelance marketplace, whose bio reads: “Hi, there! This is LouisF, soundtrack composer. Music is my passion and, especially, composing soundtracks for video games. I believe I have the right tools for creating the perfect tune for your project.”
LouisF charges about $1 per second of music he composes (and that’s finished, mastered product, not his work-time; an incredibly affordable rate, in other words). The low price he charges, though, reflects neither his talent level nor the passion he has for creating music. The theme he composed is enchanting, an ethereal series of chord progressions. It feels exactly like walking into a magical casino… someplace exotic, dreamlike, full of possibilities for adventure and change of fortune.
It was the perfect theme for Balatro, matching the game’s vibe exactly. And it has captivated millions of players right from the moment they boot up the title screen. There are countless covers of his music all over YouTube and the internet now, and huge professional orchestras have performed it live during industry award shows.
Sometimes in life, you get lucky. When you hire a composer off of fiverr to make music for your game, you are typically not accessing the highest echelons of musical talent or craftsmanship. And, similarly, when you are a composer on fiverr, usually the projects you get hired on don’t reach an audience of millions. But this is not a story of two people giving up in the face of unlikely odds; it’s a tale of transcending the odds.
LocalThunk and LouisF both showed up, ready to give it their all. They knew, on some meaningful level, what they wanted to do in life and allowed themselves to be driven by their desire to create. In doing so, they created their own luck.
The older I get, the more confident I become that there is nothing coincidental about luck. I was “unlucky” for many years of my life because I was living life in a way that did not leave space for the unexpected and serendipitous. When you keep doors closed, yes, you are shutting some undesirable things out… but you also preclude synchronicity and the possibility of unlikely connections. Much of the growth in my life has been driven by my shift to a new perspective: that being lucky is a choice and that you can create good circumstances, even out of what seems like disaster. Miscommunications and relationship stumbles don’t have to be a catastrophe; they can just as well be an opportunity to become closer. The universe, I have now come to fervently believe, rewards this kind of thinking.
The best way I have found to become luckier is to increase one’s surface area; the more people I meet and the more I express myself, the more chances for connection and resonance I create. Luck does not exist in a vacuum. In fact, luck takes two or more to create. There’s a reason we call it “getting lucky” when two people connect for a sexual or romantic relationship. All the best things that have happened to me in life were not things I did alone. They were the moments when someone else and I took some kind of risk together. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
So if you want to become luckier… get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Or just do the uncomfortable thing anyways, even when it makes your skin crawl just to think about it. Especially when it makes your skin crawl to think about it. Because, pro tip: the thinking is almost always more painful than the actual doing. The doing is what leads to growth, and the growth unlocks new ways to be lucky.
As an illustrative example of how growth works, when a caterpillar goes into its cocoon it literally digests itself, dissolving its own tissue into goo. One must imagine that this process is excruciating for the caterpillar. There is certainly a moment—likely many—while the caterpillar is dissolving in its tight, dark, self-created sarcophagus that it thinks in its tiny caterpillar brain, “Well, this is fucked.”
Yet like a miracle, caterpillar soup turns into something beautiful and unexpected. The moral of the story is that rebirth requires death first. Always. That’s the price of admission. Don’t let your self-preservation instincts strangle your own growth. Caterpillars are not meant to stay caterpillars forever, and neither are we.
Change and stasis alike are a form of death. But only one increases your surface area for luck. And while you might feel unlucky when you’re undergoing chrysalis, keep the faith. Keep the faith, keep the faith, keep the faith… because you’re doing growth, and growth is medieval, growth is chaotic, growth means being torn apart into a million tiny pieces and sewn back together.
When you’re dissolving into goo and thinking to yourself, “This was a huge mistake, how unlucky of me,” that is precisely the moment to remind yourself: there is nothing unluckier than being a person who never changes at all. When you disconnect the actions from the outcome and the present from the future, it all becomes crystal clear:
The dissolving is just as beautiful as the butterfly that eventually emerges.
And of course it is. They’re the same thing.
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
- Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
What a wonderful reminder to get out of routine and take chances in life. Thanks for this!