Increasing Your Surface Area for Luck

The Thing About Luck

I used to think luck was mostly random. You’re either the person who finds a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk or you’re not. You either meet the right person at the right time, or you don’t. Pure chance.

But the more I pay attention, the more I notice that “lucky” people seem to have a lot more optional scenarios in their lives. They go to more things. They say yes to more invitations. They put themselves in situations where interesting things might happen, even when there’s no immediate payoff in sight.

This isn’t about grinding or hustling. It’s about something more subtle: increasing your surface area for luck.

What Surface Area for Luck Actually Means

Think of it like this: if opportunity is rain, most of us are standing under a small umbrella. We go to work, we go home, we see the same people, we stick to our routines. Our surface area for catching anything new is pretty small.

But some people are out there with smaller umbrellas, or better yet, no umbrella at all. They’re exposed to more weather, which means they catch more rain. Some of it might be storms you’d rather avoid, but some of it might be exactly the downpour you’ve been waiting for.

The key insight for me was that most of the good stuff happens in optional scenarios. The job opportunity that comes from a random conversation at a conference you almost didn’t attend. The business partnership that started over coffee with someone you met through a friend. The idea that sparked during a dinner conversation that had nothing to do with work.

These aren’t things that happen during your regular Tuesday afternoon. They happen in the spaces between your planned life.

My Own Efforts

I’ve been running experiments in this for a while now. Take the Atlanta AI Dinner I started. On paper, it’s just dinner. No agenda, no pitches, no clear business objective. Just people in AI getting together to eat and talk about what they’re actually working on.

Only two things are certain to come out of it: a pleasant evening and a good meal.

But here’s what’s possible: someone mentions a problem they were stuck on, and another person at the table had just solved the exact same thing. A researcher shareds an insight that changes how someone else was thinking about their product. Two people discovered they were working on complementary projects and ended up collaborating.

None of these sorts of things get planned. The “luck” came from creating a space where it could happen, and those people deciding to show up.

Same thing with my coffee chat offer. I’m not trying to sell anything or find clients: I don’t consult and am not in sales. I just like meeting people who are building interesting things.

But conversations that have come out of those have given me materially good ideas, introduced me to new professional contacts, and hopefully have resulted in some luck for the folks that reached out also.

The Optional Scenario Principle

Here’s the pattern I’ve noticed: the most interesting things happen in scenarios that are completely optional. Nobody’s making you go to the local tech meetup. Nobody’s forcing you to grab coffee with that person your friend introduced you to. Nobody’s requiring you to take that pottery class or join that hiking group.

These optional scenarios are where luck lives, because:

1. Self-selection bias works in your favor. The people who show up to optional things tend to be more interesting, more motivated, more open to new ideas.

2. Low stakes = high honesty. When there’s no formal agenda, people are more likely to talk about what they’re actually thinking about, not just what they think they should be talking about.

3. Serendipity needs space. Random connections happen when people have the mental bandwidth to notice them. You can’t be serendipitous when you’re stressed about hitting your quarterly numbers.

Practical Ways to Increase Your Surface Area

You don’t need to become a social butterfly or attend every event in town. But you can deliberately create more optional scenarios in your life:

Say yes to weird invitations. That startup demo day your friend mentioned. The book club that meets once a month. The volunteer project that has nothing to do with your day job. Not everything will be great, but the ones that are great make up for the mediocre ones.

Create your own optional scenarios. Host dinners. Organize coffee meetups. Start a Discord server for people working on similar problems. You don’t need permission or a business plan. You just need to create a space where interesting people might bump into each other.

Follow your genuine curiosity. Take classes in things you’re actually curious about. Go to talks on topics that interest you, even if they’re not directly related to your work. Curiosity is a luck magnet.

Make yourself findable. Write about what you’re working on. Share your projects. Tweet your random thoughts. The internet is great at connecting people with overlapping interests, but only if you give it something to work with.

Lower the barriers. Make it easy for people to talk to you. Offer to buy coffee for anyone doing interesting work. Be the person who introduces people to each other. Small gestures compound.

The Transactional Trap

Here’s where a lot of people get stuck: they won’t go to something unless they can immediately see “what’s in it for them.” They skip the dinner because there’s no clear networking angle. They decline the coffee chat because the person isn’t in their industry. They avoid the meetup because it doesn’t directly relate to their current project.

This is exactly backwards.

The whole point is that you can’t predict where the interesting stuff will come from. If you could, it wouldn’t be luck-it would just be planning. The opportunities that change your trajectory are almost always the ones you didn’t see coming, from directions you weren’t watching.

When you approach these scenarios with a transactional mindset, two things happen, both bad:

First, you miss most of the opportunities because you’re filtering them out before they even happen. It’s classic cope. You’re only showing up to things that pass some immediate cost-benefit analysis, which is basically nothing.

Second, when you do show up, people can tell. There’s something about someone scanning the room for immediate value that everyone can sense. You’re not really present in the conversation because you’re mentally calculating whether this person is worth your time.

This doesn’t mean you have to be completely altruistic or that you should ignore your own interests. It just means that the reward-seeking should be patient and indirect. You’re not going to dinner to get a job offer. You’re spending more time with people that share geninune interests.

Start Small

You don’t need to revolutionize your social life overnight. Many of us have kids and families, it might be just getting out there and doing something once a month or quarter. Respond to a couple of the random LinkedIn message or emails we all get.

Just add one more optional scenarios to your week. Say yes to one thing you might normally decline. Create one small opportunity for randomness to find you.

Come have a coffee with me.

The rain is always falling. You just need to get out from under the umbrella.