Make Room For Unexpected Invitations

"Trust me - you should come." That was all his text said.

So I went. And I'm so glad I did.

Last week I received an unexpected invitation from a good friend.

There was a room they thought I should be in. They knew some of the people who were going to be there, and they thought I would enjoy it.

To be clear, 1) I didn't know that this room existed, or 2) who would actually be there.

I had to change my schedule to make it work, but I felt it would be worth it.

A week later, it became one of the more important invitations I received this year.

Yesterday, I was working on one of the follow-up conversations with someone I'd met because of that invitation, and I was thinking about why I'd said yes with so little information.

Why had I been willing to rearrange my schedule based on that text? There were so many unknowns.

But then, when I really thought it through, the unknowns weren't as plentiful as I had thought.

• The potential outcomes exceeded the annoyance of rescheduling the calls I had.
• My friend is not someone who would waste my time - or at least hasn't in the past.
• He knew the things that moved the needle for me right now from a conversation we'd had recently.

Those were the quick calculations that I think I did before saying yes to their invitation, and maybe it all wasn't quite so unexpected after all.

I had laid the groundwork for that invitation for years. I'd shown up in the past for this friend and found ways to bring value to the rooms where we'd been together before. I'd shared specific ways that he could be helpful in the future. I'd made a few intros for him last month. I'd responded quickly to his, "What are you doing this afternoon?"

And I'd done all of it without this invitation being the expected outcome. But everything that I had done previously had increased what my friend Greg Isenberg calls your "Luck Surface Area." Each of those things added another bit of confidence and awareness to their hunch, "Andy should probably be there - let me invite him," and they acted on it.

So, while the specifics of this invitation were unknown, maybe the invitation wasn't so unexpected after all.

What are you doing this week to increase your Luck Surface Area? What have you done in the past that has led to an unexpected invitation?