Starting somewhere new

That’s a line from my recap of my first year in the US. The Naughton Fellowship took me from Ashbourne, Co. Meath, to Notre Dame. I teared up writing goodbye notes to my family before I left 🙈 Now I’m in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The people are incredibly kind, and the weather… is absolutely freezing… but sure look! 😂

That’s Molly Graham, an early employee at Google and Facebook, writing in Lenny’s Newsletter. She says she always felt a little broken because of it. Her answer is to know your principles and take the right next step. As she puts it: “You can only see the next step.” A new place feels exactly like that for the first few months.

Gabriel’s Luckmaxxing piece leans on Richard Wiseman’s research. Lucky and unlucky people got the same chances, but the lucky ones noticed them. Molly Graham has her own name for it: your “surface area for magic”. At Notre Dame, chance meetings at the IDEA Center turned into AWS training for me. Small daily actions are how you make your own luck.

That’s Molly Graham again, on agreeing to give a TED talk. It felt a little random at the time. A year after the talk came out, TED asked her to take over its WorkLife podcast. My first year in the US had some class moments from saying yes too. I visited San Francisco and Silicon Valley for the first time, won the national GAA title with Notre Dame, and enjoyed my first snow season (‘enjoyed’ could be the wrong word! 🤣).

A club, a coffee, a teammate who showed you around? Or maybe you’re weighing up a move right now and haven’t made it yet. Someone reading this is in the same spot, so your tip could be the one that helps. What’s the one thing that made a new place feel like home for you? Reply and tell me, and I’ll pass on the best ones.