INCREASING YOUR SURFACE AREA OF SUCCESS
I believe you can dramatically increase your odds of getting “lucky” by intentionally exposing yourself to as many upside opportunities as possible. Who do you think has a better chance to catch the record-setting fish – the person using a worm and a fishing pole, or the person who casts the biggest, widest net they can? The biggest payoffs in my life have happened when I combined two things: (1) casting a large net to increase the odds a big opportunity will appear, and (2) keeping an open mind to all possible opportunities. The strategy of utilizing both of these elements together is what I like to call the “Surface Area of Success”.
The concept is basically this: the more exposure, or surface area, that you have to people, ideas and opportunities, the more likely you are to be exposed to a situation that could lead to a large upside opportunity. In other words, most one-in-a-million opportunities will be found by the person who sees the largest volume of total opportunities. Then, if you keep an open mind and actively look for big opportunities without trying to control the outcomes, you will be positioned to find opportunities that you never could have planned for. Below are two examples of times when I found myself in very competitive situations, and used the Surface Area of Success to increase my odds of finding an opportunity that otherwise would not have existed.
The Elusive Real Estate Deal
Years ago when I was trying and failing to grow my real estate business, my biggest problem was supply and demand. There was a lack of supply – not many properties I could buy that were good investments. There was a ton of demand – many people with much more experience, cash and personal connections who were buying up all the good deals. Despite putting in a lot of hard work, I was getting my ass kicked. It quickly became clear to me that I needed to get creative to find an edge if I was going to succeed in this competitive market.
I started looking for unique ways to network with people and find properties for sale that nobody else knew about. What allowed me to finally close on a deal was changing my commuting route to and from my day job to drive through residential areas instead of the highway. I would pull over and call every “For Rent” or “For Sale” sign that I saw during my commute and try to buy the property (even the “For Rent” signs). Every single time the person on the other side of the phone declined my offer to purchase the property, but I always followed up by asking if they had any other properties that they would be willing to sell. I also provided a very clear description of who I was (a real estate investor trying to get started) and what I was looking for (off-market real estate deals). My theory here was if they were selling or renting one property, there was a chance they owned or had access to other properties that I could potentially purchase.
After months of doing this, I got “lucky”. One of the phone calls I made was to a real estate agent who told me that he did not have any properties to sell me now, but he did have a steady pipeline of off-market real estate leads and he would keep my name on his list. A few months later, we closed a great deal together on a package of seven properties. I also built connections through this deal that led me to my next several deals and suddenly I was on a roll. You could look back at that phone call to a real estate agent and say that I got extremely lucky that I just happened to call someone who just happened to have a package of properties coming up for sale. But think about it… the more calls I made, the better the odds were that I would meet someone just like him. So even though it appears kind of lucky, it really wasn’t. My Surface Area of Success became so large that it was inevitable that some kind of good luck would break my way. I didn’t hit my goal because I made that one call all by itself. It was the process of calling many people for months that increased my odds of success to the point that I finally succeeded.
Finding Jobs That Don’t Exist
When I was in law school I used the principle of the Surface Area of Success to find my first job as an attorney during a very competitive job market. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 was in full force, and law firms drastically reduced the number of attorneys they were hiring. This made it very difficult to find a job. The market was so competitive the Wall Street Journal published an article about our law school class entitled “A Lament for the Class of 2010”. There were a lot of law students looking for jobs, many with better grades and better connections than I had, and it seemed as though all the good jobs were hiding somewhere under rocks.
So, I thought about ways that I could increase my exposure to possible opportunities. I pulled out the local bar directory which listed all attorneys in my city, and started contacting every attorney in the city, beginning in the “A’s”. I didn’t have to get all the way to the “Z” section, but I was prepared to do so. One law firm happened to be in need of a part-time research assistant on some interesting matters, so he hired me on an hourly basis and it was a very good experience. Another firm was looking for a full-time summer clerk, and indicated that they were planning to interview others for the position, but were glad I had saved them the trouble by reaching out first. With every phone call I made, I increased the odds that I would get a job in this competitive market. I wasn’t sure exactly what would happen, but by contacting so many possible sources for leads, I tipped the scales in my favor and I ended up with a full time job, a second part time job and quite a few connections that helped me find opportunities later in my career as well.
Like the elusive real estate deal example above, I believe I found these jobs because I reached enough people who could possibly generate a job opportunity for me that there really was no way that I wouldn’t have options. The Surface Area of Success was so big, that it was inevitable.
Embracing Uncertainty
Looking back on this, I realize that a big part of the reason this worked in both of these examples is that I kept an open mind to what a “success” looked like. In the past, I have tried to control what the outcome of a particular situation would be. I wanted to buy a specific property from a specific seller, or have a specific job. It was only when that didn’t work that I started to realize that the biggest upside might actually be in trusting that something good would happen if I increased the odds enough. Rather than control the outcome, I was much better off letting different opportunities come to me, letting them develop without closing them off.
It was a significant mindset shift for me to get comfortable with putting in a lot of effort toward something that is unknown and not clearly defined, but instead just believing that there would be some payoff, potentially a large one. What I found is that by embracing the uncertainty and letting life come to me, the doors opened up and opportunities started to present themselves that I never could have planned for. I wouldn’t have closed that first real estate deal unless I asked the follow-up questions about other properties for sale. I wouldn’t have found my first job out of law school if I didn’t keep an open mind to what my career path would look like.
I strongly believe that these principles have helped me hit some of my biggest goals, and I can’t overstate how much I believe increasing my Surface Area of Success has helped me. Hopefully you will find this concept useful as well!
