Increase Your Surface Area for Success

Why being in the right place at the right time has less to do with luck than we think.

I don’t really believe in luck.

Or perhaps I should qualify that.

I believe in the birth lottery. I was born in Australia, into a family that valued education and gave me opportunities. I’m a white woman. There are privileges baked into the starting position of my life that I had absolutely nothing to do with, and I think it would be both naive and obnoxious to attribute every good thing that’s happened to me to hard work alone.

That part is luck.

But when I look at the trajectory of my career, the businesses I’ve built, the opportunities I’ve had, the people I’ve met and the things that have eventually worked out, I don’t feel particularly comfortable calling those things lucky.

I know how much work went into creating the conditions for them to happen.

There’s a great tendency to look at somebody else’s success and identify the moment everything changed.

She met the right person.

They got that huge client.

That post went viral.

An investor happened to see their pitch.

They were in the right place at the right time.

Maybe.

But I’m increasingly interested in everything that happened before the right place and the right time.

How did they get themselves into that room?

And, perhaps more importantly:

Were they ready when they got there?

There’s a phrase I’ve heard used in business that I love: increase your surface area for success.

The basic idea is that while you can’t control exactly when or where an opportunity will appear, you can increase the number of places where opportunity has a chance of finding you.

Publish the thing.

Send the email.

Meet more people.

Ask the question.

Learn the skill.

Make the introduction.

Try the idea.

Be useful.

Show up.

Every one of those actions creates another possible point of contact between you and something that could change your trajectory.

I think of it like casting a net. The wider the net, the more opportunities you give yourself to catch something.

But I’ve realised there’s another side to this that interests me even more.

Increasing your surface area isn’t only about creating more opportunities for success to find you. It’s also about becoming increasingly capable of doing something with those opportunities when they arrive.

Become easier for opportunity to find. Become harder for opportunity to waste.

That’s where I think the work really begins.

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I played a lot of basketball growing up, and there’s a saying from sport that has stayed with me for most of my life:

Be ready when your number is called.

Imagine you’re sitting on the bench.

You’re not getting many minutes. Maybe you’re not getting any.

You could mentally check out. Decide you’re not playing tonight anyway. Stop watching closely. Skip the extra shooting session. Take your foot off the gas.

Or you could stay ready.

You practise.

You watch the film.

You know the plays.

You train as though you’re in the starting five, even when you’re not.

Then something happens.

Someone gets injured. The coach changes the rotation. The match-up changes.

Your number gets called.

There’s an element of chance in that moment. You couldn’t control exactly when the opportunity would appear. But what happens when you step onto the court has very little to do with luck.

You either did the reps or you didn’t.

I think about this constantly in business.

We tend to notice people at the moment their number gets called.

What we don’t see are the years they spent getting ready.

The work. The failures. The relationships. The reputation. The confidence. The skill. The taste. The financial runway. The thousands of hours spent becoming someone capable of capitalising on the opportunity when it finally arrived.

Luck gets credited for the moment. Preparation deserves credit for everything that made the moment useful.

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This was essentially how I built Smack Bang in the early years.

I had absolutely no idea which marketing activities were eventually going to drive the business.

So we did everything. And I mean everything.

We showed up across every channel we could think of. We created content. Built relationships. Tried different marketing activities. Put ourselves in conversations. Tested ideas. Stayed visible.

It was fairly indiscriminate. A machine-gun approach to marketing, if you will.

Part of that was probably youthful energy. But there was a philosophy underneath it that I still believe in now:

I didn’t know enough yet to know what would work.

So rather than sitting in a room trying to perfectly predict the answer, I wanted to increase the number of opportunities we had to discover it.

Throw shit at the wall. Pay attention. See what sticks.

Eventually, two channels emerged that were driving a disproportionate amount of our growth.

Great. Then we could pull everything else back and focus our energy there.

The strategy became much more sophisticated over time, but we couldn’t have narrowed effectively without first going broad enough to gather the information.

I still tend to operate this way.

Expand. Observe. Find traction. Concentrate.

There’s a time for focus. Absolutely. But sometimes we become so obsessed with doing the right thing that we dramatically reduce the number of things that could possibly go right.

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This is where I think volume gets unfairly dismissed.

We’re told to work smarter, not harder. Quality over quantity. Focus on the few things that matter.

All good advice.

Once you know what matters.

But what if you don’t yet?

Your first guess isn’t always your best guess. The first pitch might not land. The first business model might be wrong. The person you assumed would change everything might lead nowhere, while the seemingly inconsequential conversation you nearly cancelled introduces you to someone who becomes enormously important five years later.

Volume creates information.

Ten attempts teach you things one perfectly considered attempt can’t.

Ten conversations create ten different networks of possibility.

Ten pieces of writing teach you what you actually think.

Ten pitches make you considerably better at the eleventh.

Not everything needs to work.

That’s the point.

Volume doesn’t guarantee success. It gives success more places to land.

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I think visibility works in much the same way.

There is enormous value in simply reminding the world that you exist.

Not obnoxiously. Not by turning every moment of your life into content or treating every person you meet like a networking opportunity.

Just by participating.

Do good work and talk about it.

Share what you’re learning.

Publish your thinking.

Stay in touch.

Help people.

Have conversations.

Develop expertise in something and become known for it.

Because you never know when someone is going to need exactly what you know.

And when that moment arrives, you want your name to have a reasonable chance of entering their mind.

So much opportunity moves through networks in ways we’ll never be able to properly trace.

Someone mentions your name over dinner.

A former client forwards something you wrote.

A friend introduces you to someone because they vaguely remember you talking about a problem six months earlier.

Which is why I’ve always believed that your reputation has its own return on investment.

I’m generous with relationships because I genuinely like being useful to people. I’ll share what I know, make the introduction, offer an idea, give someone access when I can.

I don’t keep a mental ledger of what should come back.

But I absolutely believe it comes back.

Maybe not from that person. Maybe not next week. Maybe not in any way you could draw neatly into a funnel and attribute in Google Analytics.

But integrity compounds. Generosity compounds. Reputation compounds.

And all of them increase the number of places from which opportunity can eventually return.

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I’m also a huge believer in asking.

I think a lot of people unnecessarily shrink their surface area because they’re afraid of hearing no.

They don’t send the cold email because it feels presumptuous.

They don’t ask for the introduction because they don’t want to impose.

They don’t put themselves forward because they’re not quite qualified enough.

They don’t pitch the collaboration because why would that person want to work with me?

So the opportunity never gets the chance to say yes.

I’m very comfortable asking.

But I think that’s partly because I rarely think of an ask as one-directional.

I’m usually thinking: What can I bring to this equation? What can I offer them? Why might this be useful, interesting or valuable for both of us?

An ask should be an exchange.

Anna Mack is a Substack writer I follow who has a ritual I love: once a week, she “shoots her shot.”

A cold email. An introduction. An opportunity slightly outside her current reach. Something that has a meaningful chance of receiving a no.

I love the practice because it makes opportunity creation habitual.

Imagine doing that every Wednesday for a year. Fifty-two shots you otherwise wouldn’t have taken.

Most might go nowhere. A few might be mildly useful.

And one could change everything.

You don’t need every shot to go in.

You just need to take enough shots to give yourself a chance of scoring.

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There is, however, an obvious problem with all of this.

More can very quickly become too much.

More meetings. More projects. More opportunities. More channels. More people. More asks. More yeses. At some point, increasing your surface area starts diluting your energy rather than expanding your possibilities.

Which is why I think alignment belongs in the equation.

I’ve started thinking about success as some combination of preparation, opportunity and alignment.

Preparation is doing the reps.

Opportunity is putting yourself in the arena.

Alignment is knowing which game you actually want to play.

Because every opportunity has a cost.

Every yes is simultaneously a no to something else. Walk through one door and, at least temporarily, you are choosing not to walk through another.

So increasing your surface area doesn’t mean grabbing everything that comes towards you.

Quite the opposite.

Cast widely. Choose narrowly.

Create possibilities.

Then know yourself well enough to recognise which possibilities actually belong to you.

The more I think about this, the more I realise that increasing your surface area for success is really about participation.

It’s hard to get lucky from the sidelines.

You need to be in conversation with the world.

Creating things.

Learning things.

Helping people.

Asking questions.

Developing skills.

Building relationships.

Trying things that might not work.

Occasionally embarrassing yourself.

Putting your hand up before you’re entirely certain you’re ready.

And then, behind all of that visible participation, doing the deeply unglamorous work of becoming someone capable of delivering when something finally does work.

I think that’s the part that gets lost when we call someone lucky.

We saw the opportunity land. We didn’t see the readiness.

And maybe that’s why I’ve never particularly liked attributing my own success to luck.

I’ve had advantages. I’ve had good timing. I’ve met wonderful people. I’ve had opportunities arrive that I couldn’t possibly have engineered exactly as they happened.

I’m grateful for all of it.

But I’ve also worked my ass off.

I’ve persevered through things I could very easily have walked away from. I’ve built expertise. Taken risks. Created things before I knew whether anybody wanted them. Asked. Learned. Changed direction. Stayed visible. Kept showing up.

I’ve spent a lot of time increasing the odds.

And perhaps that’s the version of luck I believe in.

You can’t control when your number gets called.

You can’t control every opportunity that enters the game, who else is playing or all the circumstances that put you in the stadium in the first place.

But you can do the reps.

You can stay warm.

You can know the plays.

You can make sure the coach knows your name.

You can be paying attention when the moment comes.

And when someone finally turns towards the bench and points at you,

you’d better be ready to play.