Be Lucky. Convert 90 into 4,005
This post is excerpted from a speech I gave on May 5, 2018 during the MSx Class of 2017 1yr reunion in the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome home. It hit me that I was coming home when I saw Stephanie yesterday morning, and she said after seeing me for the first time in months “Jon, you look like you gained weight.” It was then that I realized that this reunion meant coming home to me.
1 year earlier, as the Class of 2018 prepared to take our place, we peppered them with morsels of wisdom we had garnered over our year on campus. Today, we could undoubtedly shower them with further wisdom from our collective experiences on the exit ramp back to the real world.
I wish I knew then what I know now
The maxim “I wish I knew then what I know now” comes to mind. Perhaps some of you who made the transition from corporate to startup life wish you had had known to take more experiential or d.school classes.
Perhaps some of you leading large teams wish you had used your super-round on Managing Growing Enterprises instead of Touchy Feely. I’m sure that all of us think what if we had listened to David Lawant, and dropped out of school to invest our tuition money in Bitcoin back in the summer of 2016.
I rarely think that “I wish I knew then what I know now.” I’m hold the firm belief that the actions I took and the mistakes I made in the past are exactly what I needed to do back then to get where I am now.
I wish I know now what I knew then
Instead, I find myself more frequently thinking “I wish I know now that I knew then.” What are the routines, habits, and beliefs that I have begun to lose touch with due to lack of practice over the last year? I know that many of you think about this from time to time.
For those of you dealing with difficult personnel decisions at work, perhaps it’s the lessons that David Dodson taught us to run headfirst towards conflict and hire slow/fire fast. For those of you angered by the actions of a coworker or significant other, perhaps it’s the lesson that Carole Robin taught to stay on your side of the net.
Maybe it’s the critical lesson that Paul Oyer taught us that marginal revenue = marginal cost.
I was reminded of this when I called Ashutosh two weeks ago to see if he was coming to reunion. As we were catching up, I described to him how overloaded I felt at work — between fundraising, prospecting and due diligence, syndicating deals, negotiating deal terms, and running two companies.
To which Ash responded: “The Jon I know would be doing all that with a smile on his face.” And I thought, he’s right, and I’m not. Why not? What has changed? What is it that I wish I know now that I knew then? I think of the generative leadership lesson that Dan Klein taught us:
“There are people who prefer to say ‘yes’ and there are people who prefer to say ‘no’. Those who say ‘yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say ‘no‘ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”
I didn’t come to Stanford for safety. I didn’t choose to start another new venture because I was seeking safety. So why be frustrated by the adventure? I was reminded of this again last week during a flow challenge with the Flow Genome Project. FGP founder Jaime Whealquoted a story of Lao Tzu speaking with his disciples.
As the story goes, one day Lao Tzu told his disciples that enlightenment happens by accident. To which one disciple angrily asked why he was waking every day before dawn? Why deprive himself of worldly pleasures? Why dedicate himself to the service of others if it takes an accident to reach enlightenment? Lao Tzu responded “to make you more accident prone.”
Luck is a skill
The reason to seek adventures over safety is to become more happenstance-prone. Another mantra that I subscribe to is that luck is a skill. We cannot create luck but we can create opportunities to become lucky.
When we work from home; when we wear headphones in an open office; when we eat lunch at our desk, we create the safety of efficiency but not the opportunity for luck. Many times safety and efficiency are what we need. But it’s not what we need all of the time.
If the chance of luck striking from going out to lunch with coworkers is 0.00001%, mathematically this is infinitely more than eating lunch at your desk.
I’m happy to see that luck has become a popular topic in this day and age. As some of you know, I enjoy spending my spare time reading scientific journals. A paper from last year caught my eye, written by a group of Italian physicists who summarized the results of a mathematical simulation that demonstrated how randomness has a greater impact on results than talent.
Consistent with Naseem Taleb’s outstanding book Fooled by Randomness, the message is not that it’s better to be good than lucky. The message is that all who are successful are lucky. They are also all good, but being good alone is not enough. Or in consultant speak:
In 2016, the EU even provided a $1.7M grant to Ohid Yaqub, a professor at the University of Sussex to study serendipity. I can see the frustration in the eyes of those of you who pitched 30 times to VC’s to raise a similar amount… this guy got as much money as I did in order to study luck? The message I took from this is that organizations are starting to value how important luck is.
In Yaqub’s paper Serendipity: Towards a taxonomy and a theory, he traces the study of luck centuries back to Horace Walpole, the polyglot 4th Earl of Orford who published the Three Princes of Serendip in 1754. Key to Walpolian serendipity — the discovery of things that the discoverer was not in search of — is a large network of weak connections (foundational to social network theory).
Yaqub also cites Paula Stephan, the Georgia State professor who authored How Economics Shapes Science. Key to Stephanian serendipity — finding answers to questions not yet posed — is having a beginner’s mindset. The curiosity to try. To think like a child. My takeaways from the research on serendipity can be summed up with two words:
Networks & Neophytes
We maximize our chance for serendipity when we approach the world with the child-like mindset of curiosity, when we choose growth over safety, and when we go out of our way to nurture those weak connections even when it may be inconvenient.
As a demonstration of the importance of networks, I’m reminded of another concept from physics, the three-body problem. The three-body problem states that there is no convergent solution to determine the mechanics of three (or more) celestial bodies. If we have only two bodies such as the Sun and Moon, we can determine the gravitational force that they exert upon each other at all times.
But if we throw the Moon into the equation, while the Sun exerts force on the Earth, the Moon also exerts force on the Earth changing its position relative to the Sun which is also changing its position relative to the Moon, and vice-versa. The more bodies we add to the system, the more chaotic it becomes.
Let’s say we have two human bodies, call them Markus and Alex. The maximum number of connections in this system of two is one. If we add a third body, let’s call him Chikara-san, the maximum number of connections among 3 bodies is 3.
Now let’s add a fourth body, let’s call her Michelle, the maximum number of connections among 4 bodies is 6. Scaling up to 10 bodies, we have 45 connections. 50 bodies gives us 1,225 connections, and 90 bodies gives us 4,005 connections.
In Silicon Valley, we talk a lot about exponential growth — here is a case where we can actually see it. The more we maintain our weak connections, the greater our chance for serendipity. To maintain a weak connection does not require much effort. But it does require effort.
Last week I spoke with our friend Weihan to check if he was coming to reunion, and in the process heard all about what our Singaporean friends are up to and relayed what those of us around the Bay Area are doing. An investment of 10mins over the course of 1yr was all it took. If the probability of achieving serendipity is low, multiplied by 4,005 it becomes a bit higher. But multiplied by zero, whatever the percentage is, it will be zero.
Qualia
If I can leave you with one closing thought, it’s the concept of qualia. Qualia is a Greek word that describes the subjective feeling which culminates from sensory stimulae. Something that we know when we experience, but cannot describe to someone who has not experienced it. Such as describing the flavor of chocolate to someone who has never tasted it, or illustrating the color red to a blind person.
The feeling of serendipity is qualia. All of us have been lucky, and if we reflect on how fortunate we are to have fulfilled the potential we were born with up to this point in our lives, we feel an even greater urge to achieve serendipity again.
This weekend, take the time to nurture those relationships, those week connections which you may have let slip over the past year. Reflect on what it is you wish you know now that you knew then.
Be lucky.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on May 22, 2018.
