How to Create Your Own Good Luck

Welcome back to my LinkedIn Newsletter! This week’s edition has advice from Christian Busch, author of Connect The Dots ! This newsletter also serves as a reminder for my live broadcast every Thursday at 12 pm EST / 9 am PST/5 pm GMT for my Newsweek interview series, Better. Today’s guest is Ruth Gotian, the author of The Success Factor ! These interviews continue to grow into larger and larger round-table discussions with the guests and audience, set yourself a reminder here and join in today!

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We can safely say that the past couple years have been one canceled chance encounter after another, with unplanned meetings and delayed journeys to new experiences and places to connect. London School of Economics and NYU academic Dr. Christian Busch has spent a decade exploring how we can use uncertainty as a pathway to more joyful, purposeful, and successful lives by bringing serendipity into our daily routines. Below are a few highlights from our recent conversation, and if you’d like to hear the rest of our interview, you can watch it in its entirety here .

The three barriers in our way of serendipity:

“One is self-limiting beliefs. All or a lot of us have this small imposter sitting with us who says, ‘oh my God, I'm not ready. I'm not worthy.’ So imagine you're sitting in a meeting and you have this unexpected, brilliant idea that comes, and then you might not bring it up because you feel you're not ready. The second one is that we airbrush serendipity out of our stories. By airbrushing it out of our stories, we think we have more control. The third one, which I think is the most important one, is to your point that we continuously underestimate how probable the improbable is.”

The hook strategy:

“The whole idea is essentially to say, how do you build memorable talking points into a conversation with your boss, with your colleague, with your uncle, with your sister, with anyone? Offer whatever you're interested in at the moment so that they can connect the dots to whichever they are the most interested in at that moment. To give you an example, Oli Barrett, a wonderful entrepreneur - if you would ask him the dreaded ‘What do you do?’ question, he would say something like, ‘I’m a technology entrepreneur, I’ve recently read into the philosophy of science, but what I'm really excited about is playing the piano.' What he's doing here is just giving you three potential hooks where you could respond ‘Oh my God, such a coincidence, my sister is teaching on the philosophy of science.’ Or ‘That's such a coincidence. We are hosting piano matinees. You should drop by.’”

Ask deeper questions:

“A lot of the time, the way we ask questions is underestimated. We tend to ask the kind of questions like, ‘What do you do?’ And things that put people into boxes, right? Imagine a situation where you go to a fishing village in Italy and you meet this fisherwoman and you ask, ‘What do you do?’ And she says, ‘I’m a fisherwoman.’ Well, there aren't many overlaps you have and not many dots you can connect. Ask her, ‘What do you enjoy doing?’ or ‘What is it about the fishing that you enjoy the most? Whatever you ask, make it more open-ended. We all actually have a lot in common. We all go through transitions. We've all lost loved ones. We've all had a collective negative experience with COVID. But if we don't bring that up, we can't really connect those dots.”

Thanks so much for reading this week’s newsletter - I hope to see you in our discussion during today’s conversation with Ruth Gotian !

If you can’t make today’s interview, there’s no need to worry, because yes - there is a replay available! We always upload my weekly interviews to my YouTube page . If you’d like to be notified when the newest episode is available, subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive a notification.

Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie