Yesterday I was reminded of the concept of "surface area of luck," which is when you dedicate your energy with passion to an activity and develop a skill, and you let people find out.
A percentage of these people can take action to leverage your skill, usually in ways you can't imagine.
I was in college and had an algebra professor from Bolivia who many people didn't like because of his difficult-to-understand accent but I didn't have a problem since my dad was from Spain and had an accent too. He gave us a list of exercises, and later I learned that most of the class couldn't even start.
I had solved the exercises I could and left the solutions written down on the sheets. Then one time I left the sheets on my chair. Someone saw them and said, "Wow, you did those exercises?! Can I make a copy?"
Then that person told others and the copies started to proliferate until almost the entire class had a copy. One of my friends joked, "You've become the unofficial Algebra tutor!"
Almost a year and a half went by, and I was looking for an internship. A lady in that same class was working at Brahma (now Ambev) and a consulting firm provided services to them. The director of that firm was our Operations Research professor.
I had never spoken to her, but she had copied my worksheets months before.
So the director asked this lady if she knew anyone she could recommend to work at the consultancy. She recommended me and it was a great gift for which I am grateful to her.
So that seems to me an example of this "surface area of luck", with the difference that I did nothing to promote it, they were just small events in a chain.
The author of this concept says that it is good to develop the skill and at the same time tell others about it.
But I don't consider myself good at promoting anything, so the alternative is to do something that helps you and also helps a large number of people. If they find out who did it, it can serve as publicity.
