I used to think luck was mostly a story people told after something had already worked.
Someone gets an opportunity, meets the right person, joins the right company, finds the right co-founder, gets selected, gets funded, moves to a new city at the right time. Then everyone around them starts explaining why it made sense.
But from the inside, it rarely feels that clean.
A lot of important things in life happen because of a conversation you almost did not have, a person you nearly did not message, a room you did not know existed, or a moment when somebody gave you more responsibility than you thought you deserved.
We call that luck because it is easier than admitting how much of life is shaped by things we do not fully control.
I do not think luck is fake. I think it is real. But I also think we misunderstand it.
Luck is not only random events. It is often the result of being close enough to possibility when something changes.
It is the result of context.
Over the past few years, I have moved between very different environments: building products in Tirana, working on education and public technology, studying in Munich, meeting people through startups, venture, and technology. Each environment changed what I could see.
The biggest difference was not simply access to money, information, or prestige.
It was access to examples.
When you see someone build something, you understand that building is possible. When you meet someone who has made a difficult decision, you realise that difficult decisions are survivable. When someone introduces you to a room you did not know existed, your map of the world gets larger.
That is why I find the idea of merit so incomplete.
Ability matters. Effort matters. Discipline matters. But none of them exist in a vacuum. People do not begin from the same map. They do not see the same possibilities. They do not have the same permission to fail, the same access to guidance, or the same confidence that asking for help will lead anywhere.
Some people have a network before they know what a network is.
Others have to build one person at a time.
I have learned that luck often compounds through action. Not because action guarantees outcomes, but because it creates more points of contact with the world.
You meet more people when you build things.
You build more things when you are willing to be bad at first.
You get better opportunities when people can see what you care about.
You learn faster when you are close enough to reality to be corrected by it.
This is why I believe in public work. Writing, building, researching, sharing experiments, showing up before something is perfect — none of it guarantees success. But it makes you easier to find. It gives other people something to respond to. It creates the possibility of a conversation that would not have happened otherwise.
That is not personal branding. It is surface area.
The more honestly you put into the world, the more opportunities the world has to meet you halfway.
But there is an important danger in talking about luck this way.
It can become another version of the idea that people are responsible for every outcome in their lives. As if everyone who has not succeeded simply did not “put themselves out there” enough.
That is not true.
Some constraints are real. Geography matters. Family circumstances matter. Money matters. Language matters. Institutions matter. Being early in your life or career can mean having no idea which doors exist, let alone how to open them.
The goal should not be to pretend that luck is fully controllable.
The goal should be to build a world where more people have access to the conditions that make luck possible.
More useful introductions.
More visible paths.
More rooms that do not require an invitation from someone already inside.
More systems that help people act before they are completely certain.
That is also why I care about technology. At its best, technology can lower the cost of access. It can help someone learn from anywhere, participate in a system that once excluded them, or find information that would otherwise remain hidden behind geography or status.
At its worst, it does the opposite. It turns opportunity into another feed, another metric, another closed system where the people already visible become even more visible.
The difference matters.
I do not want to build technology that tells people they are lucky.
I want to build technology that helps them become more able to act when luck appears.
Because luck will always matter. No one is completely self-made. Every meaningful life contains other people, unexpected timing, and moments that could easily have gone differently.
But we can still make the map larger.
We can still make the next room easier to find.
We can still give more people a real chance to enter it.