Issue #244: How to Increase Your Surface Area for Luck

Instant creativity boost. ⚡️💃🏻

Every Friday morning, my friend kicks the legs out from a folding table he keeps on his porch and sets out an enormous urn of freshly brewed coffee and a homemade loaf of sourdough. Friends, neighbors, and even strangers drawn in by the sound of conversation or warm welcomes (we recently summoned someone riding by on a tandem bike), stop by in shifts, each with their own mug. The concept is incredibly simple—coffee and bread—but the main draw is the invocation my friend hand-letters on the invitations, “Increase your surface area for luck.”

The phrase, which he first came across in Cate Hall’s article, inspired the first ‘porch coffee’ last summer, and is centered on the idea that while you can’t create your own “good luck,” you can put yourself out there for luck to find you. The more people you meet, the more likely you are to have an exchange that inspires or helps you, in some way. Cate puts it this way:

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.

Since January, I’ve swung by the porch most weeks and have been amazed by the ways in which the chance meetings have already influenced my life. In the past month, I met the manager of a space that sounds perfect for in-person Morning Person events, joined the crew putting together a puppet show this summer, got connected to the woman I hired as my book coach, made friends, and met creatives who have inspired me in myriad ways. Of course, hosting a “porch coffee” is just one way of “increasing your surface area for luck” and, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I feel my most inspired and alive when I’m living my life in this way. As an experiment, I spent all of last week living according to this mantra, and came away feeling creatively super-charged.

Read on for low- to high-effort ideas for increasing your surface area for luck, and real examples from last week: