What Is a Living Lucky® Salon? And Why?
What Is a Living Lucky® Salon? And Why?
A salon is a bunch of people at somebody's house, talking.
That's it. Nobody's selling anything. Nobody's getting a haircut. I spent most of my career in sales, and this is the hardest thing I've ever tried to explain. It's also free.
The card
We made invitations, and I was put in charge of handing them out. In hindsight, that was a staffing decision.
I thought they were beautiful. White card. Big brush strokes of coral and teal and navy and gold down one side. LIVING LUCKY across the top in giant letters, with "Lucky" in gold script slashed across the middle. Then, underneath, spaced way out so you couldn't miss it: S A L O N.
I thought they were elegant, branded, and clear. I've since had to let go of clear.
People read the one big word on the card that wasn't our name. The women asked if they were getting their nails done. More than one guy informed me he doesn't go to salons, he goes to the barbershop, like I'd questioned something about his upbringing.
Then there's the rest of the card. A company logo. A tagline about creating your luck. An invitation to come to our house.
If you've been an adult in America for any length of time, you know what that is. That's an essential oils party. Somebody's going to hand you a clipboard at the door.
Jana thinks a few people assumed it was something else entirely. On the podcast I said "drop your keys in the bowl," which I'd like to take back and can't.
So, for the record. No pills. No potions. No oils. There's a bowl, and it's for chips.
We'd started out even simpler than this. The first idea was having a different couple over for dinner once a week, and even that made people nervous. Why do you want us to come over for dinner? Can we just go out to dinner?
Like we'd asked to borrow a kidney.
A word for the year
At the start of this year, Jana picked a word for the year: relationships. I picked connection, which is basically the same word in a different shirt.
That's the first question of the Luck Activation Formula. What do I want to experience? Usually you ask it about a Tuesday. Ask it about a whole year and you get one word back.
Then Jana was typing into ChatGPT that she wanted to meet interesting people who inspire her soul. It said, have you thought about a salon?
So that's how we found out about a several-hundred-year-old idea. From a computer.
Gertrude's Saturdays
The one everybody points to is Gertrude Stein. She was an American writer living in Paris in the early 1900s. On Saturday nights she opened her apartment to painters and writers and anybody else thinking in a strange direction.
Picasso came when he was young and broke. Hemingway came before he'd published a novel.
That's the part I keep going back to. She wasn't collecting famous people. She was putting interesting people in a room before anybody knew they were interesting, and a good bit of what came out of those rooms is hanging in museums now.
On the recording I called that curating luck. Jana corrected me, which happens.
You can't curate serendipity. You can't put the lucky thing on the calendar. What you can do is set up the room where it's more likely to happen, then get out of the way. People call that preparation meeting opportunity. I think it's mostly just inviting people over.
Nobody asks what you do
In the last couple of weeks we've been to a Rotary meeting, a chamber event, and a networking mixer. I'm not naming any of them, because nobody did anything wrong. That's just how those rooms are built.
Somebody asks what you do. You give the elevator pitch you've said four hundred times. They give you theirs. Somebody mentions the traffic. Cards change hands, and everybody drives home knowing each other's job titles.
Social media's the same trade. I give you this, you give me a like.
So there's one rule at the salon. Nobody opens with "what do you do." You ask what's exciting right now. What are you celebrating? Something you finished, something you're in the middle of, or something you haven't started yet.
A job title is a fact. What you're celebrating comes with a feeling attached, and people will talk about a feeling for twenty minutes if you let them.
| Instead of this | Try this |
|---|---|
| What do you do? | What are you celebrating right now? |
| Where do you work? | What's exciting in your world lately? |
| How's business? | What are you in the middle of that you love? |
| Crazy weather, huh? | What's something you haven't started yet that you can't wait to? |
"What are you celebrating?" is also How Lucky Am I. It's the last question in both of our formulas, asked out loud, with other people in the room.
Idea sex
We didn't make up the name for what happens next. We got it from James Altucher. We were sitting in one of his lectures when he called it idea sex, and it's been one of our favorite ideas ever since.
His practice is to write down ten ideas every day, for yourself or for somebody else. Keep at it long enough and your brain starts pairing them up on its own. Two half-ideas become one whole one you didn't see coming.
A salon does that with people. Somebody says what they're working on, and I hear where I might fit. Or something that could go on top of it. Or the piece it's missing.
The morning we recorded, I told Jana at coffee that we don't know what we don't know, and what we don't know is holding us back. She liked it enough to repeat it on the podcast. In our house, that's the highest honor there is.
Somewhere in there I also said we were taking it from the 1920s to the 1970s. Club 54. It's Studio 54. Nobody on the recording corrected me.
Five to seven minutes
The first salon is for our Toastmasters friends, Saturday, October 10.
We see these people every week. We've heard a lot of their speeches. And I realized I know most of them at about a five-to-seven-minute level, because that's how long a speech is. I know what they chose to stand up and say. I don't know the soil it grew out of.
On the podcast I tried to explain why that matters, and here's what came out: we do the things we do because of who we think we are, and what we think a person like us would do in a situation like this. But also because of who we think we're becoming. And sometimes those two fight.
Jana's response, live, on the air: "I have no idea what Jason just said. I don't think anyone listening did."
My response was that people should rewind it and write it down. That was the whole plan. Assign the audience homework.
So let me try it the kitchen-table way. There's who you are right now, and there's who you're trying to become. Everything somebody does comes out of both. When the two line up, things get easier, and you feel like life is going your way. When they don't, you feel friction and usually can't say where it's coming from.
A five-minute speech tells me what somebody did. Three hours together might tell me who they're trying to become. That's the part I want to know. It's also the only part where I might be useful to them.
It's at our house. The card calls it a backyard oasis, which I wrote, and I stand by it. I programmed our home address into my GPS as Club Med.
We built the place on the lake, then the dock, then the pool between the house and the water, then a fire pit a little way down the hill. I expect people to start on the lanai and end up out on the dock, and I've got no plans to stop them.
If you stay up late enough, you can see the Disney fireworks over the tree line at the end of the slalom course. The card says it ends at eight. The fireworks are later than that. We'll see who notices.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: Next time you're around people you only know one way, skip "what do you do." Ask, "What are you celebrating right now?" Then listen longer than feels normal.
Reflection question: Who do I see every week but only know at the five-minute level?
Journal prompt: If I answered How Lucky Am I out loud tonight, what would I be celebrating? One thing I finished, one thing I'm in the middle of, one thing I haven't started.
Action: Write down three people who'd never meet unless you introduced them. Invite one of them over this week.
Throw one yourself
You don't need us for this. You need a room, some food, a few people who wouldn't normally end up at the same table, and one rule about the first question.
We told everybody they could bring a plus-one: a spouse, or their most interesting friend. I like the second option more than I can defend.
My Salon
A room, some food, good people, one better question.
Plus-ones welcome: a spouse, or their most interesting friend.
Nobody opens with "What do you do?"
How Lucky Am I?
If you throw one, tell us what happened. If you'd rather come to one of ours, go to livinglucky.com, open the contact page, and put "Salon" in the subject line. We'd like to do these a few times a year.
Frequently asked questions
What is a salon gathering?
A small group of people meeting at someone's home for open-ended conversation, with no agenda and nothing for sale. The tradition goes back centuries in Europe. Gertrude Stein's Saturday evenings in Paris, where Picasso and Hemingway showed up before they were famous, are the best-known example.
How do you host a salon at home?
Invite people who don't usually cross paths, feed them, and replace small talk with one better opening question. That's most of it. The host's job is setting up the room and then staying out of the way.
How many people should you invite to a salon?
Enough that everyone meets somebody new, and few enough that the conversations stay real. We handed out about forty invitations for our first one, knowing schedules and family obligations would thin that out.
What can I ask instead of "what do you do"?
"What are you celebrating right now?" or "What's exciting in your world lately?" Both skip the job title and go straight to what the person cares about.
Is a Living Lucky® Salon a sales pitch?
No. Nothing is sold, nobody's recruited, and there's no clipboard. It's people at a house, talking.
What is idea sex?
A term from James Altucher for what happens when two separate ideas combine into a new one. You can practice it alone by writing down ten ideas a day. A salon does it with people, when one person's half-idea meets someone else's.
We talked through all of this, awkwardly, on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 38.
We Create Our Luck®.
