How to be Luckier

Do you ever get your most exciting ideas just as you’re trying to fall asleep?

I literally jumped out of bed the other night to email this one to myself:

You get luckier when you become a bigger target for luck to hit. 

When you become impossible for luck to miss. 

If you’re a target, you make yourself bigger.

You take up more space.

You increase your luck surface area so that dream opportunities simply cannot avoid hitting you.

Here’s how:

👀 *Psst: scroll to the bottom of this newsletter for a giveaway!

🎯 TINY TARGET, EASY TO MISS

Tiny Target Behavior:

• Saving other people’s content into your “ideas” folder.

• Letting someone else speak for you in a meeting.

• Letting your LinkedIn collect cobwebs, or staying locked out of your account since college graduation (@ my friend Julie, love you).

• Swallowing your creative ideas because you’re afraid of feedback.

🎯🎯 MEDIUM TARGET, CATCHING STRAYS

Medium Target Behavior:

• Sharing content about your work, your ideas, and your POV on platforms where like-minded people are hanging out. This is usually LinkedIn, TikTok, or X.

• Scheduling coffee chats with people you admire.

• Taking the recruiter phone screen interview for a new role, even if you’re not sure if you’re interested yet

🎯🎯🎯 BIG TARGET, HARD TO MISS

Big Target Behavior:

• Telling your well-connected friends/contacts exactly how they can help you.

• Showing up at the industry conference as an attendee, sharing content with your biggest takeaways, and tagging the professionals or brands you interacted with.

• Asking experts in your world for feedback on your work, implementing that feedback, and then following up with them.

• Cold pitching your dream collaborators a thought-out idea, and following up if you don’t hear back immediately. 

• Going to the dinner party, mixer, or networking event where you don’t really know anyone, introducing yourself to one person, and thoughtfully reaching out to them the next day.

• Turning your big goal into daily habits that you stick to devotedly, whether or not you’re seeing any visible progress on any given day.

It feels bad to admit this, but I’ve started and stopped with this very newsletter multiple times over the past five years (!) because I thought my audience wasn’t growing “fast enough” and that no one really cared about what I was sharing. That was dumb, and I regret the lack of consistency. 

But when I have been consistent? And the fact that I still have a catalog of work that’s publicly available to anyone interested in working with me? That’s led to pinch-me career moments, like interviewing Hailey Paige at a sold-out Kendra Scott event, lecturing classes at my alma mater 3 years in a row, and an entry-level salary’s worth of brand partnerships so far this year. 

Acting like a Big Luck Target applies to every part of your life, not just your career: finding The One; scoring your dream home; building a wealth portfolio; discovering passions and hobbies; cultivating friendships and community that fill your soul. 

My “mid-year” resolution is to become the Biggest Luck Target I can be (without being an asshole about it, because there’s a line, and it’s called Emotional Intelligence). 

This week’s question comes from Katie, a product manager at a Big Tech company trying to find more direction in her career. She writes:

I love this question because it comes up so often. Company mentorship programs can be great but they don’t always result in the perfect match! A few things I recommend for finding senior mentors at work: setting up coffee chats specifically to learn about how more experienced women navigated their careers, attending social events where you know potential mentors may be, and leveraging Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) your company offers, especially ones geared towards other women.

Love the newsletter but want more? Did you know I put together an entire course called Pivot with Purpose? Think of it like a supercharged version of all the best content from this newsletter, tailored to help you nail your career goals.