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How to increase your surface area for luck - by Cate Hall

usefulfictions.substack.com · 1,939 words · saved by 3 readers

This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book (and builds on a couple of paragraphs in my original post on agency). I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the coming months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which is a signal about what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think! 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 go

How to increase your surface area for luck You should just do things Cate Hall Jul 23, 2025 2,707 117 438 Share Illustration by Alexander Naughton This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book (and builds on a couple of paragraphs in my original post on agency). I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the coming months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which is a signal about what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think! One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just t

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