I was young(er) and I was just about to go into a meeting for my first solo sales negotiation with a customer I had landed myself. I’d done everything ‘right’ and had due-diligently amassed huge reams of research and justification for the, to me, large sum of money I was about to ask him for.

With literally five minutes to go, I printed off some last-minute bits and pieces on the shared printer in our office only to see my customer’s name on a piece of paper in the recycling bin – the bit where people put unclaimed and over-prints. It was an email to a colleague who sat less than 5m from me.

I asked her how she knew him. It was through a government strategy working group and they were quite close. He didn’t know she worked with me and she, obviously, didn’t know that I had spent months working on him – we were in different teams and working on different brands.

She made a connection. Are you the one who’s …? Yes, that’s me. Oh, he loves the ideas and he mentioned … She gave me some ballpark figures for the kind of money he was talking about. My ‘large sum of money’ turned out to be not as large as I had thought.

I dumped all my reams of paper and winged it, quoting him a price five times larger than I had planned. He accepted without a pause.

Turns out that all the old hands in the office spent time at the printer rooting through the unclaimed sheets of paper for news, gossip, hints and tips whenever they had moments to kill while waiting for their work to print.

This is the kind of thing that Signals (and now Twitter) does for me. You make your own luck.