Stephanie Timm, PhD Author · Environment & opportunity

Designed Luck · September 8, 2026

Design more opportunity into your life.

Designed Luck is a practical, research-informed book about how useful people, ideas, invitations, and opportunities reach us—and how to shape the conditions that make luck more likely.

The biggest things in life rarely arrive on command. You cannot control which conversation, role, friendship, or ordinary exchange changes things. But you can shape the environments, people, and practices that give good things more ways to reach you.

Pre-order Designed Luck

Pre-order now · Delivered September 8, 2026

Designed Luck book cover by Stephanie Timm, PhD

How to Put Yourself Where Good Things Happen

Designed Luck starts with a problem most people recognize: the things we want most often do not arrive because we chased them directly.

You can work hard and still be too hidden, too isolated, too busy, or too far from the people and settings where good things tend to happen.

The book is practical without pretending life is fair, predictable, or fully under your control. The goal is not to guarantee outcomes. It is to notice where your life has gotten too narrow—and where one small shift could create more room for opportunity.

Use it to look at your home, calendar, routines, relationships, work, invitations, and the signals you send into the world.

This book is for you if…

  • Your life is full, but it has begun to feel overly familiar.
  • You want more useful people, ideas, invitations, and opportunities in your life.
  • You want more opportunity without trying to optimize yourself into exhaustion.
  • You suspect the life you want may require changing the conditions around you, not just pushing harder.

Free · 2-minute self-assessment

How reachable are the good things you want?

Use the past week to see which conditions are already working for you—and where one small shift could make more useful contact possible.

Take the quiz
Stephanie Timm, PhD
Stephanie Timm, PhD Workplace researcher · designed environments · behavior

The author

She studies the environments beneath behavior.

Stephanie Timm, PhD is a workplace researcher at LinkedIn with a background in environmental and behavioral research. Trained in architecture and urban planning, she has spent her career asking one question of the places we build: did we design for what we thought we designed for?

Her work studies how spaces shape what people notice, how they move, whom they encounter, and what they become able to do. She uses surveys, interviews, sensors, experiments, and close observation to understand the gap between a place on paper and a place in use.

Designed Luck: How to Put Yourself Where Good Things Happen is her first book. It brings an environmental lens to a larger human question: if chance remains outside our control, how can we arrange the conditions that help more useful people, ideas, conversations, and opportunities reach us?

Stephanie lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two daughters.