An article in my daily Substack email practically smacked me in the face: How to Increase Your Surface Area for Luck: You Should Just Do Things by Cate Hall. I couldn’t tell you who she is or what she does for a living, but her advice landed like a truth bomb, and her words – they hit. Hard. Probably because luck and I have a long-standing complicated history. It’s a mostly one-sided relationship.  It never shows up for me, but I see it throwing parties in other people’s lives all the time. It never calls, never texts, but I watch it pop into friends and family’s lives like they’re old friends.

Cate’s words made me wonder if maybe luck isn’t this fickle, elusive thing after all. Perhaps it just prefers people who aren’t afraid to put themselves out there, even if they have no idea what they’re doing.

 Still, the article reminded me that opportunity rarely shows up gift-wrapped; it’s usually hiding in the hundred small chances we take, the conversations we almost cancel, and the half-baked ideas we throw into the world just to see what sticks. Success, as the piece points out, isn’t about a perfect batting average but about how many times you step up to the plate.

This got me thinking about Andy from The Devil Wears Prada. Her Runway journey is proof of this: she didn’t nail every moment, but she kept showing up, asking questions, making connections, and slowly creating her own luck. The magic wasn’t in one “big break”; it was in stacking enough little tries to hit escape velocity finally.

We love to romanticize luck, don’t we? That shimmering, elusive thing that just happens to other people. Someone gets the job, the deal, the shot, and we chalk it up to luck, like the universe plucked their name out of a celestial fishbowl while the rest of us sat there holding empty tickets.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned, and Andy Sachs, the wide-eyed rookie assistant in The Devil Wears Prada, proves it on screen: luck doesn’t just land in your lap. You make it. Or at least, you plant enough seeds that when something finally grows, people call it luck.

Andy didn’t walk into Runway magazine and trip over good fortune. She walked into the lion’s den, took every coffee order, every snide remark, every sleepless night, and treated them like they mattered. She showed up with more care and determination than the job seemed to deserve, and somewhere between the lattes and the impossible errands, she built a network, sharpened her skills, and, without knowing it, tilled the soil for her next big break.

That’s the part no one tells you: making your own luck feels awkward at first. You flail. You say yes to meetings that might lead nowhere. You write the blog post no one reads. You half-wonder if you’re just hustling in circles. But every time you put yourself out there, every time you act like the Michelin-star chef in a brunch shift, you’re stacking the deck.

Opportunity rarely shows up with a neat little bow. It often looks like hard, thankless work. But if you keep showing up, keep giving before you take, keep being curious and meeting people without an agenda, you suddenly find yourself with options you didn’t know existed. And everyone else calls it luck.

So maybe luck isn’t magic. Maybe it’s just the afterglow of effort, persistence, and saying yes before you know what’s in it for you. Just ask Andy, she didn’t just get lucky. She made her own escape plan, one latte at a time.