Talking to Strangers Increases Your Luck Surface Area

Hey,

Welcome back to Stay Curious — a newsletter I write once per week on a few things keeping me curious in the world of tech and personal life.

On deck this week?

• how talking to strangers 10x’s your luck surface area

• yes vs no filters

• a young founder transforming oat milk

1) Last month, my wife and I did something kinda big. We bought a home. This last weekend the sun was shining and the long, lush grass was yelling at me to be cut.

But we hadn’t gotten around to picking up a lawn mower. Sunday morning, I’m out for a morning jog when I pass one of my neighbors cutting his own lawn.

We end up making eye contact so I stop, pause my airpods and shake hands to introduce myself. We start chatting, and I learn he’s in a local band and where to find the best groceries in town is. By the end of our 10 min chat, he says to me “Well Joel, if I can every help you with anything, let me know”.

That’s when I said, “well Peter, it’s my wife’s birthday this weekend and I’d love to cut our lawn today to surprise her. Could I rent that lawn mower from you today?”

With a smile he shot back — “just take it. but if you break it, you buy it”.

It reminded me — some of the things we wanna check off our list may be right in front of us. If we’re willing to slow or pace, stop and look around, you never know where a conversation with a neighbour may lead you.

2) “We say ‘no’ twice a year to 30,000 people so that we can say ‘yes’ everyday to the people we let in” — this was a line I heard from Garry Tan this morning (President of YC) and it’s been circling in my mind ever since. Here’s the math —

• YC has an acceptance rate of 1%

• But they’re incredibly hands-on to everyone that makes it in

• And they’ve created $600B+ in startup value

But they choose to only accept 1% of applicants so they can go all in on helping them vs stay surface level with 60,000 people every year.

It made me think about the work filters I say yes to. If I say yes to 99% of things, then I’ll likely only give 1% of value to each commitment.

But if I default to saying no to 99% of things, then the 1% of things I say yes to will likely be incredibly meaningful.

Interesting framework to copy/paste across projects.

3) The average Oat Milk customer consumes 6.7 litres of oil per year. Pretty gross, right?

Yesterday, I was at a pitch event where the winner was building a new type of oat milk brand out of Abbotsford BC. The name is Golden Goods. If any of you wanna give it a shot, happy to intro you to the founder, David.

4) Same packback, same conference. Earlier this week I was walking around Vancouver when I noticed someone had the same backpack as me on. It was one with a “TED” logo

I noticed it, but didn’t wanna say anything to bother him. But my assumption was he was a) likely at the same conference as me a few years ago and b) likely a cool entrepreneur with some neat project on the go

I mustered up the courage, said “hey, nice backpack”

and he said, “ah thank you, I see you got the same one”

We swapped names, shook hands and thought nothing of it.

Sure enough, I googled his name later afterwards and he runs one of the largest senior living real estate groups in North America valued at over $700m.

It makes me wonder, how many cool conversations we’re leaving on the table b/c we’re too shy to ask someone’s name, what they’re doing this summer or where they got their backpack.

Just ask, what’s the worst that can happen?

5) I keep chatting with friends about this quote as it gives helpful perspective to a lot of drama that goes on within family/business units.

It goes like this:

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf

Food is my #1 love language, feedback is my 2nd.

If you liked today’s deep dive, drop me a note or forward it to a friend.

Stay curious,

Joel

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