People in successful positions tend to describe their luck in two very different ways depending on who is listening. In public it is modesty: I was lucky. In private, when you press on it, the account usually turns out to be about a specific conversation with a specific person at a specific moment, and the odd thing about those conversations is how often they were with someone outside the usual circle. Not a colleague. Someone met at a conference, through a friend, at an event they nearly did not attend.

That pattern says something useful about luck, which is that it is not evenly distributed and it is not entirely random either. You cannot manufacture the break. You can, however, do a great deal about the number of surfaces on which a break could land. Every conversation with someone outside your immediate field is a small increase in the probability that an opportunity you could never have predicted finds a route to you. These are not plannable and all of them are more likely for the person who talks to more people.

The reason this does not happen by default is that our professional lives are efficiently designed to prevent it. The calendar fills with people we already know, discussing things we already work on, and that is the productive use of a week by any reasonable measure. The exposure to the unexpected has to be deliberately protected, which usually means accepting a few conversations with no obvious agenda and attending the occasional thing that does not fit the plan. So, as a reflection for today: how many people outside your own field did you talk to this month? And what is your luck surface currently made of?