Two ways to hit a home run
If you want to hit a home run, you basically have two options.
First path: you're just really good. Your swing, your timing, your read on the pitch—all of it lines up. You step in and you can actually intend to hit it out. That's skill. Not everyone has it, and it takes a long time to build.
Second path: you're not that good yet, but you keep swinging. You try once, twice, a hundred times. Most of the time you miss, or you get a single, or a pop fly. But if you keep showing up and taking at-bats, eventually one of them goes over the fence. You get lucky. Except it's not only luck—it's luck plus volume. You manufactured the conditions for luck by being in the game enough times.
The first path gets the documentary. The second path is how most careers actually look in the early years: uneven, embarrassing, and full of small outcomes that do not feel like progress until one of them compounds.
You can manufacture your own luck
The point isn't that skill doesn't matter. It does. The point is that the second path is available to almost everyone. You might not be able to will yourself into being "naturally" great overnight. But you can decide to take more swings. More applications, more conversations, more projects, more iterations. More at-bats.
Volume matters because it changes the distribution. One try gives you one draw from a noisy process. A hundred tries gives the noise a chance to average out and let signal show through. The home run is still rare. The surprise is how often "rare" happens if you show up long enough.
What volume is not
More swings is not spam. It is not harassing the same person for the same favor. It is not repeating the same failed approach without learning. Manufacturing luck still means paying attention. If you swing a hundred times with the same hole in your swing, you get tired, not lucky.
The useful version is: keep the cycle tight. Try, learn something concrete, adjust, try again. Each attempt should be slightly less blind than the last. That is how volume turns into information instead of noise.
Luck favors the people who show up
Luck favors the people who put themselves in front of more opportunities. So if you want more luck, the lever you have is: try more. Show up more. Ship more. The home run might still feel like luck when it happens—but you built the odds by being in the box enough times.
You cannot control the pitch. You can control how often you step in. That is the part that is actually yours.