The Universe Conspires: Narrative Capital, Luck and How to Create Surface Area for What Comes Next

In the most recent session of The Thinking Circle, somewhere in the middle of a conversation about luck and the stories we have been editing down, someone offered a Paulo Coelho quote from The Alchemist: “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

The room went quiet for a moment, and I have been thinking about why ever since.

It is not a surprising quote. Most of us have encountered it before, probably on a coffee mug or a sunset Instagram post at some point. What made it land differently in that room was the word conspires. Not delivers. Not guarantees. Not hands you the thing on a silver platter if you believe hard enough. Conspires. Like the universe is working alongside you, quietly and in parallel, but only if you are already in motion toward something. That distinction matters more than it might seem at first.

We had been talking about luck for most of the session, specifically about a Mark Manson podcast on the subject that Jennifer had sent me earlier in the week. The episode introduces a framework of three kinds of luck. The first is what you were born into, where and when and to whom, and you have zero say in any of that. The second and third kinds are different. They are the luck you create through how you position yourself, how consistently you show up, how willing you are to say yes to conversations and rooms and opportunities you cannot fully see yet. The research the episode draws on is clear: the people who seem luckiest are rarely the ones who had the clearest plan. They are the ones who stayed in motion long enough and stayed visible enough for the right things to find them.

What the room kept returning to was how rarely we give ourselves credit for that second and third kind of luck. We look at the moments where something good happened and we attribute it to timing, or chance, or being in the right place. We do not look at the accumulated decisions that put us in that place to begin with. The conversation we said yes to six months ago. The thing we built without knowing if it would go anywhere. The room we walked into when we could not see why yet. All of that is luck creation, and most of us have been doing it for years without naming it as such.

This is where the concept of surface area comes in.

Surface area, in the context of opportunity, is the amount of yourself that is visible and in motion at any given time. The more you show up, the more you build, the more you publish and create and walk into rooms and have conversations, the more places luck has to land. A person who is building something in public, who is consistently showing up in their field or their community or their creative work, has more surface area than someone who is waiting until everything is ready before they let anyone see what they are doing. The universe cannot conspire with you if it cannot find you.

I think about this in terms of my own last year in New York. A partnership opportunity I am now deeply invested in did not come from a plan. It came from a conversation that came from another conversation, neither of which I could have predicted or engineered. But I was here, I was visible, and I had been consistently building AVILA and showing up and doing the work in public month after month. That is surface area, and that is what gave the opportunity somewhere to land when it arrived.

The Narrative Capital piece of this is that the surface area you have been creating is not just about what you are doing now. It includes everything you have been through. The chapters you have been treating like liabilities, the late start, the detour, the version of yourself you left behind somewhere in the middle of everything, those experiences are part of your surface area too. They are part of what makes you recognizable to the right people. They are part of what makes your story land differently than someone who took a straighter path. A clean trajectory is easier to explain but harder to connect with. The complicated history is what makes people feel like they are talking to someone who has actually been somewhere.

The question the Coelho quote is really asking is not whether you believe the universe will help you. It is whether you want something clearly enough to stay in motion toward it, clearly enough to keep building even when you cannot see the outcome, clearly enough to create enough surface area that when the right thing comes looking for you, it can actually find you.

In the session, each of the women named a piece of luck they had made. Not something that had happened to them, but something they had created through positioning and motion and staying in certain rooms even when they could not see why. Every single one of them had been doing it for years, and every single one of them had stopped short of calling it luck creation.

That is what Narrative Capital is ultimately about. Not just reclaiming the story of where you have been, but understanding that the whole of it, the hard chapters included, is what created the surface area that brought you to where you are standing right now. The universe conspires, but it needs somewhere to conspire toward.