There are three ways to reach a business you want. Cold email, cold call, or show up at the door. Everyone knows the ranking by how much they'd rather not do them. Email's easy, calling's worse, walking in is the one you invent reasons to skip. Now rank them by how well they actually work. Same list, flipped. The hardest one wins.
That's not a coincidence, and I don't think it's really about the channel. Effort is a market. Anything easy is crowded, because easy is where everyone already is, so whatever return it had gets competed down to nothing. The inbox is full. The hard channel stays open precisely because it's hard. The friction is a filter, and almost everyone filters themselves out before you get there. You're not up against the whole market anymore. You're up against the thin slice willing to do the uncomfortable thing.
So the "path of least resistance" advice has it backwards. The resistance isn't a cost to route around. It's the signal telling you where the return is. When something feels hard and you notice almost no one else is doing it, that's not a warning. That's the opening.
It reframes luck, too. The people who look lucky at the top mostly aren't. Their luck is the residue of effort nobody else was willing to spend. They made the calls, showed up in person, did the version everyone else talked themselves out of. From the outside it compresses into "they got lucky." Up close it's just a longer list of hard things done.
Which lands somewhere almost mechanical. Outcome is close to a calculation of effort in. Not perfectly. There's noise, timing, things outside you. But the noise averages out over enough attempts, and the input is what's left standing. The free market of effort evens itself out, and the outliers on the good end are the ones who put the most in.
The practical version is simple and a little annoying. When you're choosing between routes, feel for the one you least want to take. That discomfort is usually pointing at the least crowded, highest-return move. Pick the route that hurts.
— Simon