“Luck is the residue of design.” – Branch Rickey, legendary baseball general manager

Branch Rickey is most famous for being the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who signed Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to become a regular player in Major League Baseball. In baseball circles, though, he’s perhaps even more famous for inventing what we know today as the minor league baseball farm system from his earlier days with the St. Louis Cardinals. Rickey did it so well, every other MLB team started copying him.

Previously, MLB teams had deals with minor league teams to purchase their players. Bbut in Rickey’s case, his organization actually took ownership stakes into their farm system teams and ran them as part of the greater organization. This is where Rickey’s quote comes into play.

By residue, he means “a small amount of something that remains after the main part has gone or been taken or used.” That is to say, preparation and well-designed systems will allow you to be lucky more often, long after the system is actually built.

This “residue” is obvious in the organizations he helmed; his Cardinals and later his Dodgers teams seemed incredibly lucky to develop the talent they would inevitably bring up to their Major League clubs. In fact, even after Rickey left St. Louis for Brooklyn after the 1942 season, what he left behind kept St. Louis a relevant contender for many seasons afterward. His teams weren’t so lucky; they were the benefit of a well-designed system of talent discovery and development.

While being fortunate more often than not seems like pure luck, having a strong vision that leads you to develop and design a system that works is much more the reason one enjoys a better fate than those who depend entirely on chance. While this notion may seem harmless, believing too much in the power of luck can actually serve as a major setback in trying to achieve greatness. If you believe that pure chance is the only thing that will decide your fate and overall success, then you’re unlikely to take any actionable steps that could help to make your dreams reality. Worse yet, believing in luck could actually lead you to misjudge certain opportunities that fall into your lap.

How many organizations in sports have had a wildly talented player and mishandled them, shipping them off to another team where they blossomed into a superstar? This didn’t really happen with any of Branch Rickey’s teams because they had systems in place to identify talent and develop it properly into Major League caliber players. In fact, they would produce so much talent they would have to sell contracts and make trades in order to fill holes on their Major League roster. Smart baseball teams still operate in this way today.

Outside of sports, many real-life companies still don’t have systems with a similar goal to this in mind. The most successful companies hire from within; they know what they have to work with, and know how to make the most of the talent they acquire by developing and treating them with respect for their abilities and knowledge.

So, how do we learn from Branch Rickey’s achievements and apply them to our own lives? The temptation is to settle for the cliché that “luck favors those who are prepared”. But this is a passive philosophy; it’s the mindset of a Gambler, who prepares, then waits for good cards to be drawn. Rickey’s philosophy was instead that of an Architect; he didn’t wait for luck, he designed a system that would produce a steady, predictable residue of it.

This shift in philosophy is critical. A belief in “pure luck” can be a form of fatalism, causing us to misjudge opportunities or, worse, to ignore the very power to design. Yes, real, systemic luck does exist. Some folks are born with advantages—the right circumstances—that give them better tools, more time, and a safer place to build. Branch Rickey, as a general manager of a big-market sports team, had the power to execute his design in a way others did not. But the lesson is what he did with that power: he used his system to sign Jackie Robinson as Major League Baseball’s first African American regular, challenging the systemic barriers of his time.

To truly apply this lesson, we must be honest about both. We must acknowledge the role of systemic luck while rejecting the fatalism of “random luck.” We must become architects of our own lives.

What does that look like? A Gambler “prepares” by reading a self-help book and waiting for a promotion. But an Architect “designs” a personal “farm system” for their skills: they identify what their industry needs, build a public portfolio of projects (their “minor league”), and actively scout for the right mentors and opportunities.

While a Gambler “surrounds themselves with lucky people” and hopes it rubs off, meanwhile an Architect designs a “farm system” for their ideas. They create durable, interesting work. We can even apply this wisdom to the writing world. A gambler in the online writing arena just follows trends and writes up something they hope will get enough likes, comments, and shares to get enough traction to build their audience. But taking an Architect approach means creating content, like blog posts, that serve as a sort of complex search query to scout for truly interested parties. 

Writing for trends, like the Gambler so often does, means a much more fair weather audience that comes and goes with the search trends.  However, a system built with an Architect mindset can attract interested readers who invest their time and attention. Not only that, you may discover some folks who may even add to your ideas with their own commentary, routing fascinating new thoughts right back to the architect. Whereas many content creators play the odds with the ‘algorithm’ and the fickle nature of trend cycles, those with an architect mindset can build up a self-perpetuating “farm system” from which content can organically emerge that has a built-in audience.

Therefore, the people you see who are “lucky” over and over aren’t just prepared. They’re intentional designers who built a system of habits, skills, and relationships so effective that success, opportunity, and good fortune are no longer a “freak chance.” They’re simply the residue of good design.