

Serendipity: Success in business increasingly depends on chance encounters - jonmc12
http://www.economist.com/node/16638391?story_id=16638391

======
todayiamme
This article struck a chord for me. Most of the people who form an integral
part of my life were met by pure chance. My angel investor was coming back
home one night, after a party, and the street dog I take care of started
jumping up on him. So, I pulled him off and chatted with him for a while. He
told me to come back next day and that was that.

I do the same thing with everyone I meet from security guards to random
strangers. Everyone has something you can learn from. Everyone has a story
it's just that most people never listen.

On the other hand, I've noticed that if you go out with a fixed agenda in
mind; I want to meet angels, or something. There is a higher probability that
it won't work. Most people have this ability to sense other people's agendas
and that puts them off. No one wants to be used, but everyone likes an
intelligent/decent conversation...

[edit: I forgot to add one of the most interesting ones. Recently, I met this
woman in the park, who was there with her dogs. I started playing with them
and I picked up a conversation with her. It turned out that she was an artist
(mainly a dancer) and I spent half an hour with her talking about the beauty
of things around us. We analyzed the shades of the trees how beautiful they
were dancing in the wind, while the light played with their leaves. We talked
about her dogs and her work.

It had to be one of the most interesting conversations I've had in years, and
the best part is that she liked it. :) ]

~~~
abalashov
Nearly everything good that has happened to me that was caused or assisted by
other people (most things) has happened in a manner that is difficult to see
as anything but the accident of thousands of favourably coincidental factors.

It seems obvious that one can increase the probability of this occurring by
interacting with more people and creating more opportunities, from a purely
statistical perspective, for something useful to emerge. The best way is to do
so in a goal-oriented but not overly-specific or insincere way, as you say.

Why does this merit an article or a book?

~~~
astrofinch
"Why does this merit an article or a book?"

Most popular nonfiction books written nowadays can be summed up in a few
sentences. So this example isn't really that unusual.

Blogs > books

------
petercooper
I don't think it even depends on specific techniques as those mentioned. If
you're lacking direction, it's possible to succeed merely by constantly
throwing things out there and seeing what sticks.

I kept a personal blog for years (something I've only just got back into after
a few years out) and people asked why I bothered. I had little better to do
with my spare time. Worked out, though, I got a book deal from it and for 2
years made $3000+ per month on Adsense from a few posts where I reviewed
different route finder services. Totally randomly, totally beneficial. Some
people criticized my tweeting years ago - now it's really paying off.

The worst thing you can do, IMHO, is nothing. Unless you have something you
_should_ be focusing on, keep throwing things out there, keep trying things
out, and something should, eventually, stick and give some pay back.

~~~
astrofinch
Doing nothing is a greater sin that doing something suboptimal. But if you're
doing something suboptimal, then you're likely to bring it up in a
conversation since what you do is on your mind. This creates an unfavorable
incentive system where you get punished for doing suboptimal things even
though you aren't punished for doing nothing.

Suggested solutions:

1\. have designated work hours. Become upset with yourself if you don't work
during those hours. (If your school/job sucks, don't be afraid to snooze or
cut corners during that, if you can get away with it, so you'll have more
energy for your self-designated work hours.)

2\. when someone criticizes you, suck it up. It's pretty clear to me that
criticism is more valuable than praise. Ask the person who's criticizing you
what you should be working on instead. If they're getting to you, ask what
they've been working on themselves. (Don't ask this unless you have to,
because if you do they'll probably stop criticizing you, and you want all the
criticism you can stand.)

~~~
petercooper
_when someone criticizes you, suck it up. It's pretty clear to me that
criticism is more valuable than praise. Ask the person who's criticizing you
what you should be working on instead. If they're getting to you, ask what
they've been working on themselves. (Don't ask this unless you have to,
because if you do they'll probably stop criticizing you, and you want all the
criticism you can stand.)_

I agree, but it's also key to be able to judge criticism or advice after
accepting it. Criticism that offends your sense of pride equally could easily
be useful _or_ plain idiotic and it's essential to come up with some metrics
or even just a gut instinct to tell the difference.

~~~
astrofinch
Definitely. Direct probabilistic reasoning is better than using metrics or gut
instincts though.

------
abalashov
"Increasingly?"

While new technology has certainly magnified the effects of this dynamic and
enhanced its global character, as well as lowered its cost, and granted new
conventions, mannerisms and particulars to our experience of it, this does not
strike me as a particularly novel thesis, in the grand scheme of things.

Businesspeople - invariably, of the "people person" variety (a seeming
requirement for the transaction of commerce) - have always known personal
connections and seemingly random events to be the fabric of marketing and
selling, and have been doing it for as long as labour specialisation has been
around, it seems to me. Who doesn't know that meeting people and swapping
information increases the statistical incidence of striking some kind of deal
with someone, somewhere?

Sure, it's been explicitly codified in management lore in recent times with
given buzzwords like "networking" and "mixers," to be sure. This is part of
the ongoing tendency by bureaucratic management thought to take the timeless
commonsensical narratives of the small proprietor/artisan/craftsman/merchant
and extract from them some abstract unifying thread, some principle, some
Powerpoint-worthy pithy platitudes to which the audience instinctively relates
and shells out for at $300/hr because of the psychological positive
psychological feedback it provides, that sense of empathic affirmation. It's
that warm feeling that what one has always known to be true is now also
Officially Certified as true by an awe-inspiring, credibly gigantic intra-
industrial actor, and perhaps has even had a proper noun-phrase bestowed upon
it, or, assured a permanent place in some kind of canon through elevation to
the status of a bona fide _methodology_!

This is how the management consulting arms of the Big 4 make their money,
among others -- by packaging up this kind of vapid crapola. Has anyone yet
been invited to the new webinar, "Focus on Dextrous Fingers: The Central
Touchstone to Success in 21st Century Piano-Playing?"

It seems self-evident that one maximises visibility and draws on a sense of
personal partisanship as well as accumulates valuable information in the
course of hanging out with members of one's target market as well as one's
peers/partners/complements. I would say this is a truism almost worthy of
anthropological generalisation in connection with the history of trade.

------
locopati
“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have” \- Thomas
Jefferson

~~~
gruseom
Jefferson didn't say that. It's one of those bromides that get misattributed
to a famous dude and then spread faster. According to Wikiquote
(<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson>), the actual source is
Stephen Leacock's _Literary Lapses_. (Side note: Leacock is the Canadian Mark
Twain, though not nearly as sharp, which is about what you'd expect from a
Canadian Mark Twain.) But _Literary Lapses_ is in the public domain
(<http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6340/6340.txt>) and it's easy to verify that
the quote isn't there either. So we have a misattribution squared.

I find this little domain of fake quotes fascinating. It's one area where web
search is totally broken. Search any of these quotes (like the famous fake
Gandhi one about "First they ignore you") and Google will happily serve you
ream after ream of crappy web pages all repeating the same mistake. Or perhaps
you'll get some pages saying a quote was Benjamin Franklin and others saying
it was Einstein (they're both wrong). This is a weakness of web search: stuff
that gets repeated often enough (as catchy misquotes certainly do - that's
what they're optimized for) becomes the answer, drowning out the truth.

Presumably the antidote to social-proof-driven search is some kind of trust-
based system. As far as quotes go, Wikiquote seems to be emerging as an
authoritative place you can use to check up on things. But it's a bad sign
that the above citation turned out wrong.

------
dmillar
Our first reseller agreement was started at a stop light. Guy had medical
imaging stickers on his car, so I struck up a brief conversation and followed
up.

This is an often-overlooked component of traction. 80% of our early successes
have been from chance encounters, either via web, or physical. Just making
oneself available for chance encounters (e.g. coding at a cafe) can greatly
increase your chances of traction, IMO.

------
gxs
I totally agree.

We all read the same blogs. We read the same books, take more or less the same
classes at schools, watch the same videos, read the same articles. We all have
at our disposal cheap, powerful technology.

What is our advantage?

This point can be spun two ways: because our resources are so uniformly
distributed, we can attribute more and more to randon luck. On the other hand,
you can also say that because all else is equal, success depends solely on
your creativity and and hard work.

Interesting topic for sure. And btw, personally Im a firm believe that we have
a hand in making our own luck.

------
farmer_ted
This is one of the ideas put forward in Taleb's "Black Swan": by increasing
your exposure to positive "Black Swan" events, you can improve your chances of
being successful (with _something_ ).

One way to increase your exposure to positive Black Swans is to get out and
mingle in a diverse environment; that fosters serendipitous encounters, which
can lead to positive outcomes.

One of the things I really enjoyed about Taleb's book is his point about the
role of luck in the general result of being successful.

------
anigbrowl
'Chance favors the prepared mind.'

------
cal5k
This article featured perhaps one of the greatest lines I've ever read in the
Economist: "Schumpeter was tempted to visit some creative destruction on the
book with a blowtorch."

------
wuputah
While the article makes a point that I'm inclined to agree with after two
years of running my own business, I stopped reading when they mentioned that
World of Warcraft is a game of "swords and hobgoblins." World of Warcraft does
not have hobgoblins. Ok, well actually, they're being added in Cataclysm, but
I doubt the author knew that.

Then again, maybe my downfall was too much World of Warcraft.

