(2025-07-24) Hall How To Increase Your Surface Area For Luck

Cate Hall: How to increase your surface area for luck. One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff — socially, intellectually, professionally. It’s the rate of experimentation, the number of shots on goal, that provides the magic, not the percentage of successes, which might be very low at first.

It sounds stupidly simple, but it’s profound: the more times you interact with the outside world, the more chances you have to get lucky — to find the collaborators, friends, and projects that, together, provide the right soil for you to bloom in.

Conversely, people who move more slowly through life tend to get fewer shots on goal and have longer feedback loops. Perhaps they work privately on creative projects that they don’t show to anybody for months or years, or they stay in a relatively contained peer group for a long time without mixing it up.

So, what’s the most efficient and direct way to go about this? How do you figure out who the key people are, and ensure you meet them?

I think this is something you can’t really undertake with that kind of attitude. Some goals have to be approached like gardening. You can’t force plants to grow, you can only engineer the conditions in which they’re likely to flourish, and trust that the results will come.

Making your own luck is like this: As Steve Jobs put it, “you can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.” However, you can still increase your skill at being lucky. Much like skilled gardeners tend to produce lush gardens, skilled cultivators of luck tend to “randomly” accrue dense interpersonal networks.

Operate from a place of genuine curiosity

Talking to people without an end in mind other than satisfying your own curiosity is the slow way that is the fast way. People love to talk about what they’re interested in, and by extension love to talk to people who are genuinely curious about the things they’re interested in.

Of course, not all conversations will be helpful. Some meetings will be a waste of time. There’s really no way to know in advance whether someone will be fun to talk to, or helpful, or informative. When I look back on the meetings that have been the most professionally consequential for me, nearly every one of them was one I almost bailed on because I was busy or feeling shy and there wasn’t an obvious benefit to the chat.

This is an important point, and a recurrent theme throughout these tips: If you are withholding your energy for use only in those situations where you know an interaction will benefit you, you are not increasing your surface area for luck at all. You are already failing the assignment.

Assume you’re always auditioning for a bigger role

Imagine that you were the chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant and, for some reason, you were assigned a shift as a regular brunch cook. You would probably perform unusually well

The winning move here is to start behaving like that chef when you’re just a cook. To assume that you’re aiming for a future that will hold you to a much higher standard.

The lesson here isn’t that every excess outlay of effort pays dividends immediately; it’s that people really notice when you show up despite it not being a matter of duty or obviously in your self-interest. And people remember it.

Give before you take

Another thing I’ve noticed about many people who’ve achieved outlier success: They are surrounded by people who they trust implicitly and who value loyalty and reciprocity. Essentially, their professional lives are one giant positive-sum game, where everyone is eager to do favors for one another.

There’s only one way to start building this kind of network, which is to act with generosity towards others before you know whether it will be reciprocated. Generosity can be in the form of attention, e.g. being an unusually responsive conversational partner. It can be in the form of time, e.g. going out of your way to meet somebody where it’s convenient for them, or helping them out with small tasks. Or it can be in the form of resources — it’s really hard to go wrong with buying someone lunch.

Air your weirdness

It’s still under-appreciated how powerful it is to put your thoughts on the internet. Yes, even now, in 2025, when Substack is the hot social network.

Host events

One way to increase serendipity is to throw parties or events, especially a regular series of get-togethers that’s low-pressure to attend. This can be extremely simple, like having acquaintances over for coffee on your stoop, or a casual meeting at a pizza place. You can do this if you know five people in your city, or five hundred.

In my experience, lots of people want more social interaction, but few are willing to initiate events, so it’s powerful to be the person who provides for that unmet need. Even when you have an established network, it’s a great way to densify the connections in your life.

Unsure what to host? At the risk of losing my edge, I’m going to let you in on a secret: bagel brunch. My husband and I host them once a month, and they have become the cornerstone of our social life. You can feed dozens of people cheaply, it feels low-stakes to everyone involved, and there’s rarely any competition for people’s time early in the day on weekends.

A period of lostness is a part of it

At the beginning of this process, it will feel artificial, like you’re socially flailing and trying too hard. Because you will be socially flailing, and trying too hard.

And then, something will start to change. You’ll make a couple of key contacts who will introduce you to their favorite people. (Some might refer to these key contacts as “friends.”) You’ll start to get a sense of who’s respected, who is a drama factory, who can be counted on and who’s flaky.