Carly Valancy beamed in from Valencia, Spain.
Some of you will remember Carly. She interviewed me on her Substack, A Good Omen, a while back. This week I got to return fire.
Four years ago, Carly reached out to the writer Alex Dobrenko`. When she interviewed him, she asked who she should talk to next. He said me. She sent me one email. I said yes. Then I sent her one email (”I know how busy you are, but...”), and she said yes. Somewhere since then, I also filled out the intake form for her next Reach Out Party cohort, which means I am now both her interviewer and her student, a conflict of interest I intend to exploit fully.
She told me my ask landed as a gift, not an imposition: “I ran outside and told my husband. You know what’s so cool? The chain of events that can happen from one email or DM.” That’s her entire body of work in a sentence. One email. Everything else is scaffolding.
Carly is a former actor. Broadway community, Hell’s Kitchen, 44th Street, the whole catastrophe. At about 25, stuck in a coffee shop job she hated and hunting for an agent, she did the thing that would become her life’s work without knowing it: she reached out to 1 stranger a day for 100 days.
It worked, in the boring, verifiable way these things sometimes do. She found an agent she’s still friends with. She booked a national tour. And around day 82, she finally mentioned the whole scheme to her acting coach, who was appalled. Not by the project. By the secrecy. “You have to tell people you’re doing this!” Then: “When you get to day 100, you should throw a party at the studio. I’ll host it. You can call it Carly Valancy’s Reach Out Party.”
She ran the 100 days again at 30, and the second lap taught her the lesson hiding inside the first:
“There was so much more beauty in the process, in who I became in it and how I found my voice. A lot of people treat networking as a means to an end. It’s something you do when you need something. Instead, think about it as a process of becoming.”
Carly has a phrase I’ve been carrying around like a lucky coin: increasing your surface area for luck. More reach-outs, more rooms, more chances for the universe to trip over you. Lately she’s refined it into something even better: “placing yourself in the current of serendipity”…
I asked her to define a good omen, given she’s named an entire publication after one. She gave me a visual instead:
“I’m going to give you a lava lamp. It’s constantly moving, and there’s some kind of glow about it where you’re just like, what is that thing? It’s got texture, and it’s alive.”
Then she gave me a better one, borrowed from the theatre director Anne Bogart, whom she cold-emailed (of course she did) with the same question:
