Strategic Proximity

Opportunity is not created. It is revealed. Most people think opportunity comes from hard work, talent, timing, or luck. But what if those things are only part of the story? Throughout life, we move through different circles: schools, workplaces, industries, communities, friendships, and interests. Each circle contains its own knowledge, assumptions, blind spots, and opportunities. What is obvious inside one circle can be completely invisible from another. Strategic Proximity explores a simple but powerful idea: opportunities become visible when we move closer to different people, perspectives, and environments. Through a series of interconnected stories spanning a childhood in Redfern, six schools before graduation, university punch cards from the 1970s, a two-month trip to Florida that unexpectedly opened extraordinary doors, and encounters with people who changed the trajectory of a life, Corey Gross uncovers a pattern that had been hiding in plain sight all along. Part memoir, part observation, and part exploration of human behaviour, Strategic Proximity challenges conventional thinking about success, networking, and opportunity. Instead of teaching readers how to manufacture outcomes, it reveals how curiosity, movement, and perspective make new possibilities visible. This is not a book about collecting contacts. It is a book about entering rooms. It is not a book about creating luck. It is a book about seeing what was already there. By the end, readers may discover that the opportunities they have been searching for are not as far away as they imagined. They may simply be standing in a circle they have not entered yet.