I once stood in a hospital hallway that wasn’t a hospital at all, wearing borrowed scrubs, trying not to laugh at a director’s cue I didn’t fully understand. Six weeks earlier, I’d filled out a casting form on a whim, half-convinced it would vanish into some inbox and never surface again. That’s usually how it goes — right up until it doesn’t.
We tend to talk about luck as if it’s handed out at random. Some people seem to be standing in exactly the right place when the right opportunity arrives — they meet someone who changes the direction of their career, they hear about an opening at the perfect time, they take one small chance and it becomes a story worth telling.
From the outside, these moments look accidental. Lately I’ve been wondering how much of luck is less about waiting for the right moment, and more about becoming the kind of person who’s more likely to encounter one.
Over the past year I’ve started treating luck less like a mysterious force and more like something I can make room for. I’ve widened my circles, broken familiar routines, spoken more openly about what I want, and taken chances before I felt ready. I even built what I call the 1,000 Rejection Challenge — a personal project where I set out to collect 1,000 nos, by applying, pitching, and asking for things far more often than felt comfortable. It sounds like a challenge about rejection, but it was really about volume: giving life more chances to say yes by giving it more chances to respond at all.
I still don’t think we can manufacture every outcome. Luck, by definition, contains chance. Timing, access, privilege, preparation, and circumstance all play roles we can’t neatly control. But I’ve started to believe we can make ourselves easier for luck to find — and that most of the “finding” happens well before the lucky moment itself, in the ordinary, unglamorous decision to act and then to say something about it out loud.
I Wasn’t Unlucky. I Was Hiding.
For a long time, I read a lack of opportunity as proof I wasn’t particularly lucky. Looking back, the real problem was smaller and more embarrassing: almost no one knew I existed. I was moving within a very narrow radius.
The Excuses I Kept Making
I followed the same routines, talked mostly to people who already knew me, and kept most of my creative interests to myself. When an opportunity came along that excited me, I built a convincing case for why I shouldn’t pursue it: someone else was more qualified, my work wasn’t ready, I lacked the right background, I needed more time or a clearer sign I belonged. No one had actually rejected me. I’d simply made the decision on their behalf.
What the Challenge Actually Changed
I broke that pattern with the 1,000 Rejection Challenge. The goal wasn’t to make rejection the center of my life — it was to interrupt my habit of eliminating myself before anyone else had a chance to respond. Instead of measuring only wins, I started valuing attempts. I applied for scholarships. I entered writing contests. I answered casting calls. I said yes to speaking, volunteering, and creative projects that didn’t fit neatly into my professional identity.
Many attempts went nowhere. Some earned polite rejections. Others vanished into an unanswered inbox. But a surprising number became yeses: a writing scholarship that flew me across the country for a gala where I didn’t recognize a single name on the seating chart, a contest that brought recognition and a box of merchandise I still haven’t fully unpacked, that stint as a hospital-hallway extra, an interview on CNN where I sat in the green room rereading my talking points until they blurred, sure someone would realize I didn’t belong there. No one did. Add to that an invitation to guest-blog for a university newsletter.
Those came from completely different directions, but each one shared the same first step: I put myself within reach of the opportunity. The challenge didn’t create luck on its own. It just gave chance a wider surface to land on.
Doing Isn’t Enough. Neither Is Telling.
Here’s the pattern behind those yeses, and I didn’t invent it — it just matches what I lived: opportunity tends to find people who are actively doing meaningful work and willing to talk about it. Doing without telling means your effort stays invisible to everyone who might have helped. Telling without doing is just noise. It’s the combination — quiet competence plus a willingness to be known — that gives luck somewhere to land.
Researchers who study self-described “lucky” people have found something similar: it’s rarely about predicting the future more accurately. It’s about interacting with more of it — meeting more people, noticing more openings, taking more small social and creative risks, and recovering well when a plan falls apart. Not reckless risk. Just the low-stakes kind: introducing yourself to a stranger, sharing work before you’re sure it’s ready, applying when you meet most — not all — of the qualifications.
None of that guarantees anything. But it changes how much of the world you’re standing in front of when something unexpected passes through.
Your Routine Is Quietly Editing Your Life
Routine is necessary — life is already full of work, family, errands, and obligations, and familiarity helps us move through our days efficiently. But it’s also editing your world without asking permission. We take the same roads, talk to the same people, consume the same information, and reinforce the same ideas about who we are.
This past year I tried to introduce new inputs on purpose. I went to events I might once have skipped — including a local writers’ meetup I’d bookmarked and ignored for two years, where I ended up talking for an hour with someone who later connected me to the writing contest that got me that gala invitation. I picked creativity back up after treating it as something that belonged to a younger version of me. I volunteered, applied, submitted, and followed interests without needing each one to fit a five-year plan.
Most of these choices didn’t feel transformative in the moment. They felt slightly awkward or mildly inconvenient. That may be how change usually starts — not through one dramatic leap, but through small deviations: the event you almost skipped, the conversation you nearly avoided, the application submitted at the last minute.
Silence Has a Cost Nobody Warns You About
Doing has always come more naturally to me than telling — I can work quietly for hours, learning, writing, organizing, improving something behind the scenes. Sharing it is harder, because sharing invites judgment. It can feel premature or a little embarrassing to say I want to write, speak, or build something before I know whether I’ll succeed.
But silence has its own cost. People can’t send you an opportunity, make an introduction, or recommend your work if they don’t know what you care about. I learned this the awkward way: a former coworker later told me she’d known someone looking for a guest contributor for months, and never thought to mention it to me, because in three years of working together I’d never once said I liked to write. Naming a goal also changes what you notice. Once I started thinking of myself as someone who writes, I began seeing submission calls and contests I would have scrolled past before. Once I got more open about my life as a military spouse, I started noticing chances to speak and connect within that community. The opportunities probably hadn’t suddenly appeared. My attention had changed.
Telling doesn’t have to mean self-promotion. It can just mean publishing something, offering help, or answering honestly when someone asks what you’ve been working on. The goal isn’t to get louder — it’s to become visible in the places where your interests might actually matter to someone.
Most of This Will Look Like It Failed
This model is useful, but it isn’t a promise. Doing more and communicating better can’t guarantee a result — chance is still chance, and plenty of effort genuinely leads nowhere. That doesn’t make it wasted.
A project can sharpen a skill even if it never succeeds publicly. A rejected application can clarify your story or prepare you to recognize a better-fitting opportunity later. This past year has taught me to weigh an attempt by more than whether it produced an immediate win: Did I learn something? Did I meet someone outside my usual circle? Did I get better at saying what matters to me? Not every door needs to open for the knocking to change you.
The Deposit You Don’t Get to Track
Here’s the part I didn’t understand until recently: luck isn’t really a force acting on you, and it isn’t really something you generate, either. It’s closer to a form of memory — other people’s memory, not yours.
Every time you do something and say something about it, you leave a small deposit in someone else’s mind: a name attached to a skill, an interest, a piece of work they half-remember. You have no idea when, or whether, that deposit gets withdrawn. It might sit untouched for three years and then surface the moment someone needs exactly what you happen to do, in a conversation you’re not even in the room for. That withdrawal is what we call a lucky break. But it was never a coincidence from their side — it was recall. You’d simply given them something to recall.
That reframes the whole project. You’re not gambling on the universe noticing you. You’re slowly populating other people’s memory with true, specific, findable versions of what you’re actually doing — and then living your life while those deposits sit there, waiting for a use you’ll probably never get to witness firsthand.
So the question isn’t only will this work. It’s who will remember this, and what will they remember it as, when it finally becomes useful to them. You don’t get to control that moment. You only get to control what there is to remember.
The Short Version
If none of the rest sticks, here’s the shape of it. Luck rarely arrives as a bolt out of nowhere — it behaves more like surface area. Programmer and entrepreneur Jason Roberts described this with a rough formula I didn’t come up with but keep coming back to: Luck = Doing × Telling. Do meaningful work, and you build something worth finding. Talk about it honestly, and you give it somewhere to be found. Neither half works alone, and neither one guarantees anything — but together they expand how much of the world’s randomness you’re standing in front of.
That’s really all I did. I did more. I told more. I broke my routine on purpose, stopped judging every attempt by whether it succeeded, and let a rejection count as effort instead of failure. None of it manufactured a guarantee. It just gave luck more surface to land on — and, as it turns out, gave other people more of me to remember when it mattered.
Your Side Quest
You don’t need a spreadsheet or a 1,000-rejection challenge to start. You need one deposit.
This week, make exactly one:
- Do one small, slightly uncomfortable thing you’ve been talking yourself out of — apply, submit, sign up, show up — something you’d normally disqualify yourself from before anyone else got the chance.
- Tell one specific person outside your usual circle what you’re working on or hoping for. Not a broadcast — a message to one name. Something true and findable, like “I’ve been writing again” or “I’m trying to break into X.”
- Write down what you did, one line, somewhere you’ll actually see it again — not to track outcomes, just to prove to yourself later that the deposit was made.
Then let it go. You’re not owed a return on it, and you probably won’t see the withdrawal coming. That’s the part that isn’t yours to manage.
Leave a comment