You Can Create Your Own Smart Luck

How to harness the power of serendipity

When we envy some people’s successes and consider them undeserving winners, we attribute the outcomes to blind luck. It is as if Dame Fortune whimsically chose them over others to give her favours.

Some people are lucky to be born into a culture of privilege that gives them a head start in life. That doesn’t mean the rest of us can't be lucky in our lives.

Blind luck is the play of chance, but smart luck is active luck we can cultivate for ourselves. It operates at the intersection of opportunity meeting a prepared mind.

We can create our own luck. We can develop a mindset and skill to be in a permanent state of preparedness to face the unexpected and turn it into an opportunity to solve a problem or add value to our own and other’s lives.

Welcome to the world of serendipity! This beautiful, high-sounding word is a tribute to the English language’s word-making abilities.

British writer and politician Horace Walpole coined this word from the Persian fairytale The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the heroes possessed the gift of making lucky discoveries.

Dictionary.com defines serendipity as:

1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
2. Good fortune; luck

Both the above definitions do not capture the word’s underlying profundity of meaning. Dr Christian Busch, in his book, “Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck”, defines serendipity as:

“unexpected good luck resulting from unplanned moments in which proactive decisions lead to positive outcomes.”

Serendipity arises from a felicitous synergy between chance and astute human action.

Serendipity is a process that involves the following steps:

1. Unexpected circumstances
2. Insight
3. Connecting the dots
4. Projecting value
5. Exploiting or extracting value
6. Valuable outcome

Serendipity is present everywhere

Serendipity is ever present in our daily lives. A plumber comes to your neighbour’s place to fix a leak in their kitchen. On seeing him, you suddenly realize that you need to fix your leaking overhead tank. You use the plumber to solve your problem. This is serendipity at work.

You and your friend, both writers, are sharing a long flight out of town. You avoid talking to strangers, while your friend is vivacious. She introduces herself to the passenger sitting near to her and engages in a friendly chat. She discovers the passenger works as a senior editor at a publishing house. She tells him about her unpublished book. The publisher asks her to mail the manuscript to him. A few weeks later, your friend becomes a best-selling author!

Your friend became a best-selling author while you languish in obscurity. You cannot attribute her success to mere luck. She struck a conversation with a stranger with no reservations. When she came to know that he was a publisher she used the opportunity to promote her book.

Your friend took action and used her intelligence to sell her work. You did nothing. How can you attribute her success to blind luck?

Your friend is a serendipitor. She knew how to use the ‘serendipity field’ to court luck. The unexpected talk with a stranger gave her an insight when she learned the latter was a publisher. She thought about her unpublished book and immediately connected the dots. She extracted value from a chance encounter and reaped the reward of getting her book published.

The opportunity space for serendipity exists everywhere. Some are quick to spot it when it occurs while others squander the opportunity.

People believe science owes about thirty to thirty-five per cent of its major breakthroughs to the power of serendipity. The scientists were investigating one thing and stumbled upon another discovery by accident. Examples: Penicillin, X-Rays, Viagra, etc. Archimedes is the archetype of serendipitous discovery.

How to harness the power of serendipity

In order to leverage opportunities for tapping into the hidden secrets of the unexpected, we must identify the three core characteristics of serendipity.

First, it is the trigger can be anything like an unexpected event, a conversation, or any eventuality.

Second, it is about connecting the dots, trying to extract value from seemingly unconnected phenomena, ideas or experiences.

Third, realizing the value in terms of insights, innovations, novel ways of doing or thinking, etc.

We can develop the serendipity- mindset, the capacity to identify and implement the above steps as an integrated process.

Our linear thinking and biases obscure serendipity. The four biases that block serendipity are underestimating the unexpected, conforming to the majority, post-rationalization, and functional fixedness.

What you look at is what you see. We “expect’ the world to function in a ‘typical’ way. Openness to the unexpected is key to getting lucky and to experiencing serendipity.

“We have always done it this way”, is the most dangerous sentence in the world.

Post-rationalization has a close link to ‘hindsight bias’- the perception that events were more predictable than they were. Our tendency to seek recognizable patterns or identities can obscure the significance of random events.

We feel happy to think that we are always in control of things. We prefer to tell a linear story with a predictable beginning, middle, and an end.

Functional fixedness is blindness created when we regularly use a tool in a particular way and the practitioners can’t imagine any alternative ways of using the tool. Many experts suffer from functional fixedness or rigidity. Major strength should not turn into core rigidity. If there is no hammer you don’t see everything as a nail.

Reframe thinking and be alert to the unexpected

The more alert and observant we become the more we can recognize the unexpected and turn it into an opportunity to solve problems. An unprepared mind ignores unusual events and cannot observe the serendipity triggers.

We can look at the world either as full of obstacles to justify our failures or as full of opportunities that sometimes arrive through unexpected turns that we can use to construct meaningful lives.

A curious open-minded attitude is alive to alternative possibilities. It can create a virtuous cycle of looking at existing things and ideas with a fresh eye and opening the doors to unexpected discoveries. This how we create our own luck.

Reconstructed Living Labs( RLabs), a South African organization helped thousands of poor black people turn their lives for better by inspiring them to turn local resources of the community into productive skills. People learned computer and social media skills and started small businesses and enterprises to support their families and communities.

The beneficiaries learned to look around for unseen possibilities to improve their lives. They learned to spot emerging serendipity.

Reframing prevents us from getting stuck in preconceived plans and ideas. Winging or improvisation will assist us to adjust to emerging situations and be open to the unexpected.

In biology, there is a theory of ‘adjacent possibilities’ — every interaction in an ecosystem increases the potentiality of what can happen next.

When we meet a new person, we should treat the interaction as an opportunity to learn new ideas, concepts and worldviews.

As we grapple with unexpected events, we may have to rely on our intuitive skills based on our prior experiences. Gut feelings when aligned with information can help us navigate difficult situations.

Being a giver rather a taker can open pathways to serendipity. Being grateful and kind elicits a reciprocal attitude from others who may lead us to exciting new ideas, events, and people. However, we must take care of ourselves and set boundaries for the generosity to add value to others’ lives and extract potential serendipity in the interactions.

Being serendipity-ready

Extraversion increases the possibilities for serendipity. Extroverts meet many people, are friendly, and smile more often. If you know 100 people who have contacts with 100 other people, you are in second-degree touch with 10, 000 people which opens up possibilities for 10, 000 chance encounters and resultant openings.

However, serendipity works best in a combination of extraversion and introversion as connecting the dots sometimes needs calm reflection as the links may not be obvious at all times. Introverts can use positive emotions to improve their alertness to new opportunities.

Energy is at the core of existence. Radiating good energy helps to expand the serendipity fields for ourselves and others. People get attracted to positive energy and respond accordingly.

Seeding serendipity triggers

Serendipity happens unexpectedly, but we have to sow its triggers before it can occur. Our exposure to unknowns outside our comfort zones will expand the serendipity space. These can include people, ideas, information and resources.

Serendipity is not a one-off miracle, it hides an incubation process that starts with seeding a trigger, making connections, and using the new opportunities.

When people ask you the dreaded question, “what do you do?”, you can reply with hooks attached like, “I am an engineer interested in philosophy”, “I want to write a book on Artificial Intelligence”, “I am a volunteer in an Environmental protection startup”, and so on. We never know what hooks the listeners will latch on to.

The notion of overnight success has struck deep roots in our psyche. That’s why we find it easy to dismiss others’ success as a matter of luck than admit the fact that grit and tenacity led them to a stage where they made luck happen.

How we process unpleasant experiences greatly influence our ability to attract serendipity. As Susan David said in her book “Emotional Agility”:

“Discomfort is the price of admission to meaningful life.”

We can amplify serendipity by building networks where people act as multipliers. In April 2010, Nathaniel Whittemore, an entrepreneur, got stranded in London as an exploding Icelandic volcano. disrupted all flights across Europe. He had just attended the Skill Social Forum, an annual conference of social entrepreneurs at Oxford University. He called Christian Busch, introduced himself and asked him to help host an impromptu TEDx conference. Within thirty-six hours, Nathaniel organized the TEDxVolcano conference with 200 well-known attendees.

Organizations can expand opportunities for serendipity by providing psychological safety to employees to assure them it is OK to make the odd mistake. An enabling culture that facilitates the sharing of knowledge and free flow of ideas will help disrupters to stumble upon innovations.

Teachers and parents should train children to face the unexpected not as threats but as opportunities to discover the hidden values.

Wrapping up

We need to review our notion of luck being all blind. We are not helpless before an imaginary and arbitrary dispenser of favours and privileges. We can create our own smart or active luck by developing a serendipity mindset. We cannot go on searching for serendipity, we can see it when we face the unexpected and the unforeseen with a mind well prepared to detect new insights and connections.

Life’s inherent uncertainty, when faced with a serendipity mindset, no longer looks like a threat, but an opportunity to discover meaningful insights to add value to our lives. Societies and nations will flourish if more and more people develop the serendipity mindset and come up with productive and mutually beneficial innovations.

Thanks for reading!