How to create good luck | Just Reflections - Issue #31
These days I’m fascinated by the idea of luck and serendipity, so let’s talk about it again. Specifically, let’s talk about how to create good luck.
Have you ever encountered people who seem to have the scales of luck unfairly tipped in their favour? They just so happened to be present when a new scholarship opportunity was announced and by some stroke of luck, they had just read a book that spoke about how to write a winning application for this exact scholarship. They’ve been taking up building Arduino based IoT devices as a hobby. Then by some alignment of the stars, the new big client at work wants an account manager who understands Arduino based IoT devices, so the big account goes to them. It’s like they have a magic crystal ball telling them the next thing to work on to set themselves up for the next opportunity.
I don’t consider myself very lucky. In fact, I rarely play any games of chance because I’m convinced that the stakes are always stacked against me. I’ve never won in any lucky draw or raffle or anything similar. That kind of luck just doesn’t seem to be on my side.
Maybe that’s why I’m interested in this. What if being lucky is a skill you could master and share with other people? Modern life is full of chance encounters, changing plans, delayed journeys, human error, and other mishaps. What if we could use such unpredictability to our advantage? Dr Christian Busch believes we can.
In his book “The Serendipity Mindset: The art and science of creating good luck.” he explores how, if acted upon, unexpected encounters can enhance our worldview, expand our social circles and create new opportunities.
I haven’t finished this book but I’ve really enjoyed it and today I want to share my top lessons so far.
What is serendipity?
Before we go further, let’s look at what serendipity is exactly.
The Oxford dictionary defines it as:
the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
Other sources I’ve read define serendipity as “a happy accident”. In Christian Busch’s book, serendipity is presented as luck we have agency in. The kind of luck our actions can affect. I like that definition so let’s go with that.
Hard work, talent and intelligence don’t tell the full story
If you listen to the stories of successful people, you can easily feel inadequate. Sure you’re talented and hardworking and smart but it usually seems like they have a special intelligence and hard work that’s not accessible to us mere mortals because they set plans for their lives, put in the work and like clockwork everything fell into place for them.
However, success stories are usually partly made up at the end looking back. We claim the journey was from A to B to C in a structured, planned way. We report that we planned this and this is how it turned out when, in fact, we had to wiggle our way through many twists and turns. It was more from A to 3 to -1 to a … to Z to C.
As a result, we don’t really learn from listening to success stories because we’re not telling the actual stories. And, more importantly, we neglect the role of the serendipity that happens all the time in the most interesting projects and the most transformative experiences in our lives.
In most cases, serendipity plays a pretty big role in getting people to where they are. Sure they put in the hard work, they’re incredibly talented and smart, but there are many smarter, more hardworking and talented people for whom things just aren’t coming together. Not that these things aren’t valuable, their value can’t be overstated. But, hard work plus talent plus intelligence doesn’t always equal success. So there must be something else beyond just hard work and talent. There must a threshold beyond which intelligence alone can’t push you past.
Many good things that happen to us happen on the back of failed plans, accidents and unexpected circumstances. You met your partner ‘by coincidence’, you came across your new job ‘by accident’. Or you randomly picked up a magazine just to find exactly what you needed to know to solve a problem.
Such moments, big and small, can drastically change our lives. And we have to wonder, how might life have played out had everything gone exactly according to plan?
‘I’m always surprised when I see people who have been successful.. … and they’re absolutely convinced that it’s all because they were so smart. And I’m always saying, well, I worked hard, and I’ve got some talent, but there are a lot of hardworking, talented people out there.. There was this element of chance to it… of serendipity… [and] you want to see if you can maybe figure out how to sprinkle that stardust on other people.’ — Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States of America
Cultivating Serendipity
Sure, we can all appreciate that there’s some luck needed for success. But why does it seem like there are some people who are luckier than others?
According to Christian Busch, serendipity is not just about a coincidence that happens to us. It can be created. It is also the process of spotting and connecting the dots, which allow us to see bridges where others see gaps. When we master that, then serendipity will start happening all the time in our lives.
Unexpected things happen all the time, more often than we think. We just miss them most of the time. So how can we prepare for the unexpected so that when it happens, we can spot it quickly? The advice I found on this falls into these three categories:
Do things to generate more chance opportunities (Trigger).
Recognise those opportunities when they are in front of you (Connecting the dots)
Take actions on the ones that matter (Tenacity)
Do things to generate more chance opportunities (Trigger).
This is sometimes referred to as motion; the willingness to break out of your routine. The idea here is to continuously seek new experiences so that you increase your surface area for catching serendipity. It also involves putting yourself in situations where you will meet people because people are often the channel for serendipity.
Go to conferences, workshops and events. These are controlled environments outside your normal routine where you’re encouraged to think and to meet new people. They’re controlled in the sense that everyone is there to explore new ideas and meet new people, so your motives are mostly aligned. So the environment is ripe for special chance encounters because you’re all here for the same thing and you’re likely interested in similar topics. But each person can bring their unique perspective.
Don’t be the first person to leave the event as soon as the main agenda is finished either. Hang around and talk to people.
A lot of times when we have ideas we self sensor. We do this for various reasons. Sometimes it’s imposter syndrome. We shut down our ideas before they make it out of our brains and miss the opportunity for them to become something meaningful by getting engagement from other people. So serendipity dies because we might not feel like we’re the ones to bring a certain idea or we fear opposition.
Recognise those opportunities when they are in front of you (Connecting the dots)
Creating motion and increasing your surface area for serendipity will mean nothing if you can’t spot those serendipitous moments when they happen. The second skill, then, is preparation. Preparation is about having the mental ability to connect disparate ideas, disparate people and disparate events in ways that other people cannot see or recognise.
Roman writer and leader Seneca believed that luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity and Louis Pasteur thought that chance favours the prepared mind.
Because serendipity is an accidental discovery, it’s easy for us to perceive serendipitous moments as distractions from what we had planned to do. We can just as easily dismiss it. Being ready to see that chance occurrence when it happens, being open to exploring our distractions is key to cultivating serendipity.
To fully leverage the discoverability and connectivity that today’s mobile-networked world enables, you must hone your ability to connect the dots of chance encounters and seemingly random information in creative and productive ways. — Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Take actions on the ones that matter (Tenacity)
The third thing is the skill of divergence. This is having the tenacity to do something different.
A lot of life is about building routines and processes and habits. These are necessary to ease our lives and allow us to achieve efficiency in the things we do repeatedly. And yet, most of the great leaps and major life-changing chance events often happen when people break routine and do something different. Those moments in time when we thought we were going to do one thing but ended up diverging and doing something completely different.
Christian Busch summarises these ideas with this diagram.
As the diagram shows, the path to serendipity can be interrupted at any of these three phases. If we haven’t learnt to pay attention to the unexpected, we can miss serendipity. We’ll miss it if we don’t see the trigger. If we don’t connect the dots, we’ll miss it. And even if we see the trigger and connect the dots, if we don’t then have the tenacity to do something with it, we can also miss it.
If you’re looking for a further breakdown of actionable steps to creating luck, check out Swyx’s blog on How to create luck.
Final thoughts
Several more ideas are explored in the book like:
Reframing Situations
Placing Diverse Bets
Setting Hooks
See people as what they could be not just what they are
…
What is most fascinating to me is the fact that something as abstract as serendipity can be explored in such a structured and scientific way. Check out the book for yourself.
What are your ideas about luck? Do you agree with any of this stuff? Do you have different ideas? I’d love to know and chat about it.
That’s all I have for you this week. If you like the newsletter, consider sharing it with others on Twitter, WhatsApp or Facebook. Hit the thumbs up or thumbs down below to let me know what you think.
I hope I’ve given you something to think about this week and I wish you ever-increasing curiosity.
Until next week.
BK
2022 Resolutions:
Weight: Get to 75kg by April 28 and 70kg by July
Yet another week where I failed to break that 79kg mark. I had a conversation with one of my friends this week and I was telling him that one of my challenges with managing my eating is social events that are structured around food. It’s much easier to eat healthier and in smaller quantities on my own at home. And the past two or three weeks have had multiple events. Hopefully, I’ll master that soon. I think I’m still on track with the goal though.
Sleep: Consistently sleep avg. 8 hours per day
Averages this week:
Duration: 5h 56m.
Avg. bedtime: 05:00.
Avg. wake-up time: 10:08.
This is turning out to be the hardest one of these three goals. I’m really stumped about how to do better here. My struggle is that I am most productive at night, after midnight. And I enjoy working at that time, it’s so peaceful. But I also have to start work on a set schedule, which is mostly out of my control. Sure, I sometimes end up catching up on sleep later during the day, but I’ve heard that the most important sleep is done at night, so I’m yet to figure out how I’ll resolve this one.
Business: Start a business in 2022
This week I had an interesting conversation with Shawn Wang (@swyx) about Pro-Search. He’s built Better Twitter and has had some interest in trying to improve search in general so I enjoyed getting his opinions on my ideas and the direction I want to take. And it was quite validating to hear someone whose opinion I really value say it’s a problem worth working on and he’d love to see what it becomes and be one of the first people to sign up.
Impactful ideas that challenged my thinking.
I have a lot of interests so I'm always learning all kinds of things, some of which really challenge my thinking. In the Just Reflections newsletter, I'll be sharing with you a summary of the ideas that challenged my thinking recently and hopefully they will challenge yours too and we grow together.
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