How To Create Your Own Luck
Luck--in business and in life--isn't
always something that happens to you, it's also something you can find and help
create.
Failed actors rarely give career
advice. "The advice business is a monopoly run by survivors," writes David McRaney of You Are Not So Smart. The chefs who failed
don't have a line out the door of their restaurant. The entrepreneurs who
launched, failed, and didn't try again don't end up on the cover of Fast
Company.
To
McRaney, the problem with the stories of the super productive, super creative,
and super successful is that they miss half the equation:
You
must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers,
successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one
side of that equation you are always neglecting the other. If you are thinking
about opening a restaurant because there are so many successful restaurants in
your hometown, you are ignoring the fact the only successful restaurants
survive to become examples. Maybe on average 90 percent of restaurants in your
city fail in the first year. You can’t see all those failures because when they
fail they also disappear from view. As Nassim Taleb writes in his book The
Black Swan, "The cemetery of failed restaurants is very silent."
While
the survivors are very, very loud, as they supply neat narratives of How They
Did It, the satisfying movement of cause and effect. If you (get up early/stay up late/network hard) you will be a great (entrepreneur/artist/writer). If you think that one
input creates one output, you're employing linear thinking, in a form of what Taleb calls the narrative fallacy, where we reduce the
messiness of life into cleanly, consumable stories of how to live.
But
success is nonlinear: we can't know how something will turn out at its outset. Not even Google can predict how
employees will perform at the point of hire. As David Lee observes, the savviest
entrepreneurs cooperate with the unpredictability: when Jeff Bezos is talking
about going down "blind alleys" that turn
into "broad avenues," he's really talking about exploring unproven
trajectories can yield high-flying business--like Amazon Web Services, the cloud
arm that's now eclipsing bookselling in sales.
You
could say that Bezos is lucky, but it might be more accurate to say that he's
cooperating with chance.
Psychologist
Richard Wiseman studies luck. Over a decade, he followed the lives of 400
subjects across professions who described themselves as lucky or unlucky.
McRaney, again, provides a synopsis:
In
one study, he asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number
of photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky
took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who considered
themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had
placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the
newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this
newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that
read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.”
The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.
So
luck--in business and in life--isn't something that happens to you, it's
something that you look out for, and in looking out for it, participate in the
creation of.
Prof.
Richard Weisman: "For thousands of years we've had very superstitious
thoughts about luck, but the reality is, your thoughts create the luck in your
life"
How
so? It's your patterns of behavior--the actions and reactions you have with the
events and people you interact with in life. Luck isn't "magical,"
Wiseman tells Skeptical Inquirer magazine, it's "rational":
you can, with reason, better work with the weird, opaque, endlessly
multifaceted probabilities that life presents us.
Wiseman,
thankfully, has supplied us a cheatsheet for having a more productive
relationship with chance. According to his research:
Lucky
people maximize chance opportunities: They create, notice, and act on
opportunities--like by meeting lots of people and being open to new
experiences.
They
listen to their hunches: And practices like meditation allow them to clear their
mind of thoughts and act more quickly.
They
expect good fortune: Anxiety precludes you from seeing
possibilities, a
calm optimism allows you to spot them.
And
allow us to add a fourth:
They're resilient. The more funding you have,
the more "runway" the startup has to "pivot" from. The more
you're determined that's "it's going to work," the longer you'll stick around until
it does work. Grit predicts success. That success is born of courting serendipity.
By Drake
Baer http://www.fastcompany.com/3022297/leadership-now/how-to-create-your-own-luck?partner=newsletter
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