Documented: Roberts's 2010 Codus Operandi post defines Luck Surface Area as directly proportional to doing something you're passionate about times effectively communicating it, L equals D times T. The author's own case is on the record: early Uber contracting work and stock, acquired via party conversations made possible by prior public work. The concept spread through startup culture in the 2010s, with documented critiques: doing and telling compete for the same finite hours, and the formula measures exposure, not fortune.
The folk extension: luck is weather, your surface area is the panel, and the three classical domains map directly, Heaven sets the climate, Earth is where you mount the panel, Human is how many square meters you build. The formula's documented limitation, it ignores conversion efficiency, is handled by the folk with a shrug: build first, optimize later.
The claim: surface area works because the world's anomalies, synchronicities, openings, unmarked doors, are broadcast continuously, and doing-and-telling is just tuning and antenna, which is why the formula's author got the formula's reward. The darker reading: expanding surface area expands what can reach you, and not everything broadcast is benign.
Is this a model of luck, or a renaming of it that makes it trainable?