Hi all,
Before getting to the main article, I wanted to share Luke Burgis’s thoughts on purpose, which I found interesting this week:
“Without a clear sense of purpose, everything is “just an opportunity.” But of course the whole world is full of opportunities. Very few of them are opportunities that you or I should be pursuing.
How should an opportunity be evaluated? In financial terms? In its capacity for growth and learning? In professional prestige? In terms of risk vs. reward? In its propensity to allow for “human flourishing”?
The less specificity we have about who we are, about the unique circumstances we find ourselves in, and about the particular word that our lives cry out for us to speak—a word which, if it is left unsaid, will be lost to the world forever—the more prone we are to evaluate opportunities in abstract and impersonal ways.”
Hope this resonates with you too. Have a good weekend!
Brendan
As I tentatively and (sometimes) reluctantly make more regular visits to the office, I’m now recalling one of the bonuses of co-working: serendipity.
Random encounters on the way to work, in the hallways or at the maligned coffee machine don’t just make me feel human again, they sometimes lead to unintended connections. Serendipitous encounters are almost never a bad thing at work, and when they’re good, they can be really good. Randomly tagging along to a work happy hour is how I landed my current project.
I lost touch with serendipity over the pandemic. Over the last few years, I relied too heavily on planned remote networking to meet people. You know, reaching out to people for virtual “coffee chats”, only getting a few responses, and then having a relatively awkward virtual conversation. I realized this can be a good a way to meet people if I knew exactly who I wanted to speak with and why. But most of the time, as someone early in my career, I didn’t really know who the right person was or what exactly I was seeking out.
Sidebar: Nassim Taleb’s teleological fallacy (from his book Antifragile) is “the illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.” We’ll come back to him in a second.
Happy hours, panels, office watch parties… all of these events can seem like a time suck on the calendar, but I’ve finally recognized they are opportunities to let serendipity go to work, to let randomness select an interesting, mutual connection for me to slowly figure out where I’m going. I think of this process as collecting free lottery tickets. Many may not lead anywhere—and that’s expected—but a few can be highly valuable.
Returning to Nassim Taleb, another quote of his (from The Black Swan) comes to mind to make this more concrete:
“Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing [serendipitous] opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters – you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity. […] Diplomats understand that very well: casual chance discussions at cocktail parties usually lead to big breakthroughs – not dry correspondence or telephone conversations.”
So does this more aesthetic advice from La La Land…
“Someone in the crowd could be the one you need to know
The one to finally lift you off the ground
Someone in the crowd could take you where you wanna go
If you're the someone ready to be found”
Thanks for reading! I love when these thoughts lead to conversations with readers. Did you find anything interesting or surprising? Reply to me and let me know.