trends life, luxury & the pursuit of happiness
BOOK VALUE
The Serendipity Mindset Luck? It’s all in your head. By Ed McKinley
PHOTOGRAPH: THOMAS BARSTAD ECKHOFF, COURTESY OF CHRISTIAN BUSCH
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n his book The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, author Christian Busch differentiates between what he calls blind luck and smart luck. Some people find themselves blessed with blind luck, like the good fortune of being born into a prosperous family. Others work to achieve smart luck by recognizing and combining valuable opportunities and then acting upon them— what Busch calls “connecting the dots.” Busch, who teaches at New York University and the London School of Economics, had been thinking about serendipity long before he wrote the book. “What I found fascinating is that this kind of positive coincidence seems to pop up everywhere,” he told Luckbox. “So I had this curiosity about it.” For a while, he simply talked about serendipity with friends. But then a bolt of lightning struck. He suddenly realized serendipity could serve as the guiding principle for his next book about the future of business. “So that’s how the book came about—as a serendipitous moment in itself,” Busch recalled. “My whole journey, in a way, has been serendipitous encounters working off of other serendipitous encounters.”
A mindset For some people, serendipity doesn’t just happen. Many of the world’s most joyful and successful people cultivate the serendipity mindset. Think of it as a philosophy of life that anyone can adopt. It requires opening oneself to the unexpected, casting aside preconceptions and envisioning connections among seemingly unrelated
elements. It’s a shift from passive acceptance of events to actively shaping outcomes. Busch provided the example of a California entrepreneur who found himself stranded in London when a volcanic eruption in Iceland grounded flights throughout Europe. Knowing some of his peers were also marooned, he organized a conference that attracted
Author Christian Busch takes to the lecturn to share his ideas on inviting serendipity into every interaction and creating opportunities for good luck.
May 2021 | Luckbox
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