Serendipity: Success in business increasingly depends on chance encounters
economist.com
economist.com
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. :) ]
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?
Most popular nonfiction books written nowadays can be summed up in a few sentences. So this example isn't really that unusual.
Blogs > books
Hypotheses:
Humans have two modes of interaction with one another: social and economic. People tend to react much more favorably to each other during social mode, and this mode is only accessible during casual (serendipitous) encounters.
Salespeople are good at tricking others in to assuming the social interaction mode while the salesperson is assuming economic interaction mode.
The two modes theory explains why it's considered impolite to discuss how much money you make with friends.
The specific set of people you encounter may be largely a function of chance, but having the right mindset and drive to make the most of those relationships is not something you can't intentionally build.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then again, maybe my downfall was too much World of Warcraft.