Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Christian Busch: The Art of Serendipity: How to Cultivate “Smart Luck”

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

This episode is about how to create your own luck, featuring USC Marshall’s business professor and bestselling author, Christian Busch.#Endgame #GitaWirjawan #ChristianBusch---------------About the Guest: Christian is a German author, educator, and business professor at USC's Marshall School of Business. He is also an affiliate researcher at the London School of Economics, where he previously taught and co-directed the LSE Innovation Lab. His famous book is ‘The Serendipity Mindset’ (2020), proposing the idea that “good luck isn’t just chance”.About the Host:Gita is an Indonesian entrepreneur and educator. He is the founding partner of Ikhlas Capital and the chairman of Ancora Group. Currently, he is teaching at Stanford as a visiting scholar with Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy; and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.---------------You might also like:https://youtu.be/9eIMWmRG12whttps://youtu.be/dCEiC7W3Wywhttps://youtu.be/g8F5nd-eAyU---------------Explore and be part of our communityhttps://endgame.id/---------------Collaborations and partnerships:https://sgpp.me/contactus

Sometimes people then feel underappreciated when people say, well, you were just lucky. No, no, no, no, no. I worked really hard to be lucky. And so I think it's those kind of things where trying to understand and parsing out what is really luck versus what is the hard work that went into that luck. And that's why I find serendipity so interesting as like the muscle for the unexpected that you're building that makes it more likely also in the future that you will be lucky. And then hopefully you attribute some of that also to the hard work that made it more lucky. Hi, friends. Today, we're honored and happy to be graced by a professor about a name of Christian Bush, who teaches at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. And Christian also happens to be the writer of serendipity mindsets. Christian, thank you so much for gracing our show. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here. Christian, tell us about, you know, your upbringing and how you came to the point of starting to think so much about.

serendipity and also to the point of writing this great book, which I've just, you know, completely read. Please. I mean, you know, I used to be that kid I was thrown out of high school and had to repeat a year and, you know, transferred this into my driving style. Probably helped the inofficial world record of how many dustpins you can knock over on your way to school when you're driving. And then one day wasn't so lucky anymore. And, you know, crash into four-part cars, all cars completely destroyed, including my own.

And I won't forget the policeman. He came to the scene and he was like, oh my God, he's still alive. And you know, that idea that I was supposed to be dead that stuck with me. And I asked myself all these weird questions, you know, if I would have died, who would have come to my funeral? Who would have actually cared? Was it all worth it? And at that point, I had mostly depressing answers. And so it took me on this intense search for meaning, trying to figure out, you know, what is life all about.

And, you know, we talked about this earlier in a wonderful conversation about how Victor Frankel, his book, Man's Search for Meaning, help. me a lot to figure out what is my own meaning in life. What do I enjoy? What gives me meaning? And I realize a lot of that meaning comes from connecting people, connecting ideas and the sparks that come from, you know, putting two people together, two ideas together that somehow match. And so it took me on a journey, first as a community builder, as a social entrepreneur, and then later into academia. And I just found it fascinating how in the right circles, the right communities, you know, the right interesting people, you would have serendipity everywhere. This kind of unexpected good luck where people would be like, oh my God, such a coincidence, such a coincidence, such a

coincidence. But then when you step back, you realize there's a pattern behind why these people have more of this active luck. And that kind of got me fascinated. And that's what I've committed in my life to try to figure out, you know, what is the science behind that active luck, that serendipity. A little bit more about, you know, you're growing up. What role did your parents play in bringing about this way of thinking about serendipity? Well, I was very fortunate in the sense that they gave me always this feeling of you're worthy, you're worthy, you're enough. So whatever you do when you fail, that is not you as a person who's failing, but it was a project that didn't work out. And then there's the next project and you continue.

And so I think that sense of, okay, life goes on. I think that kind of gave that resilience to say, you know what? Life will continue. I mean, you know, we talked about I so far had three near-death experiences in life. You know, the car crash, then at the early outset of COVID almost killed me. And then recently, right with the wildfires here in LA where our house burned down and so on. And, you know, those kind of things where I always go back to those two things. First, this idea that, hey, look, life will go on and life has always gone on.

But also second, this kind of Victor Franco idea that I think my parents, without knowing it even, kind of instilled very early on this idea of don't try to derive your meaning from always succeeding. Don't try to always think you have to always win. You're trying your best. You put your best effort in and you're always worthy. And I think that kind of like then, in a way, de-risks it a little bit to say, you know what, sometimes things don't work out. But that's okay too.

Did your parents go through the same, well, I mean, similar episodes of serendipity, the way you have done so far? You know, it's interesting. I think they had a very different life. You know, they grew up in a more kind of rural, environment. My father, you know, he had different identities over time. You know, he grew up on a farm and then somehow he, you know, went more and more into industry. And then afterwards he went into academia. And so he lived three different lives. And I think one of the conversations

I've had with him a lot is what kind of values are most important to him? Because, you know, when you grow up on a farm, hard work means using your hands and building something. And then in academia, it's all about thinking and ideas. And so whenever he would be in academia, he would say, those people, they don't really always know what it means to work hard with your hands. And then when he would be, you know, in industry, he would be like, well, but those people, they need more ideas from academia. And so I think he was always between those different areas trying to figure out where can I anchor myself. And I think that is something I took for myself also, this idea that, you know, I've never been really anchored in either business or academia or

other worlds, but I've tried to be that boundary spanner of saying, how do we try to be that boundary spanner of saying, how do we try to figure out what we have in common, which is we all want to somehow provide a good life for our families, for our communities, so how can we do that best? And so I think that fluidity with still, you know, having some sort of anchor. And I think the anchor with my parents came similar to me in that idea of, hey, look, we try to be people who somehow have that sort of kindness in us that you propel in the world. The reason why I keep, you know, coming back to your parents, you're talking about. You talked about this guy by the name of King Gaier, Geifer, who is the ruler of serendip.

And I didn't know that the Persian word for Sri Lanka was serendip. And how he was telling the story about the three sons or princes, you know, having gone through this episode of serendipity, talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Well, that's a beautiful example, I think, right? that in a way, when you think about Sri Lanka back in the days, right, that, you know, this beautiful, beautiful, you know, think about

almost paradisic, right, setting where, and you have those three princes and they were those three princes who would walk around and they would take cues. They would see unexpected things and they would be like, oh, interesting, I see that there's something here, there's something here. There must have been a camel that walked by here, right?

Those kind of things where they connected the dots and it helps them later to identify a camel that was lost and where that camel probably walked by because they had seen those cues and so it kind of helps resolve that riddle that that came up there. But what I've always found fascinating about that story is exactly that, you know, their father essentially said, you know what? You got to go out there in the world to figure out what life is about because if you just stay here, you will be too sheltered and you will be too in your own ways. And so they were sent on those adventures to have those kind of to find those cues. And I think, you know, it's interesting that you connected that with my parents, because I feel

that's exactly what they've intuitively always done. They have always said, you know what, go out there, Christian. Don't stay only in your own community because if you do that, it's wonderful because you feel friendship and you feel the closeness of people, but also you don't get access to those new ideas and the things that actually could feel meaningful later on in life. And so I think that kind of going out there in the world that is definitely in the idea of serendipity, right? This idea that you try to figure out what is out there and then somehow connect the dots with that. I credit a lot of that to my parents and I think in those stories that comes out a lot. Explain the difference between smart luck and blind luck. So blind luck is the kind of luck that just happens to us.

So it's the kind of luck good or bad that creates a lot of societal inequality. Right. So some people win the birth lottery, right? Or they unexpectedly get this and this beneficial thing. That's kind of something we can't really control. And, you know, it's out of our range of, or our locus of control. But then serendipity is active luck. It's the smart luck that we can create through our own actions, how we engage with the unexpected.

So, you know, take the example, you know, in a coffee shop. If you have erratic hand movements like I do and you unexpectedly, you know, accidentally spill coffee over the person next to you, That person looks at you slightly annoyed you, but you sense there might be something there. You don't know what it is. You just have a sense for it, right? And now you have a couple of options, right? One option is you just say, I am so very sorry.

Here's a napkin. You walk outside and you think, ah, what could have happened had I spoken with that person? Option two, you start that conversation and that person becomes love your life or your co-founder or the person who rents you your next department. The point is that our interaction with the unexpected shapes a lot of what comes in next. And I think that's the beauty of serendipity that we might sometimes perceive it as something that's almost godly or almost something that kind of like came to us through some way. And then when you distill it, you will see that, yes, there was this unexpected random thing that came. And then also

at the same time, you did something in that moment. I think that's what I find fascinating. Can you build that muscle for the unexpected? And then can you train people in it so that we all have more or serendipity in our lives. How do you train somebody to be a bit more proactive, right? I mean, smart love just kind of seems like you've got to be a lot more proactive than just being reactive or passive. How do you train somebody to be like that? Well, I'd see it on three levels.

One level is the level of kind of the deeper psychological undercurrents. What is holding me back from having more serendipity in my life? Again, the societal constraints, we can't often change, right? So there's a certain idea of we are in a certain environment. We talked earlier about the certain base level, and we can talk about this more that creates a lot of inequality because some people start out differently than others. Within that structure that we're in, how can I work on myself to somehow see what's holding me back from having more serendivity?

So, for example, if you look at your CV or your life, you know, at hindsight, and you think about what were all these moments in life where serendipity could have happened but it didn't, right? So maybe you were in a meeting, you had this unexpected idea, but you didn't bring it in because you didn't feel ready, worthy, you name it. And then you walked outside and you thought, ah, what could have happened had I spoken about that idea? Or, you know, you were walking maybe to an event somewhere in the city and you bumped into like this interesting person, but you didn't speak with it because you didn't feel ready, worthy, you name it.

It's, you know, or, you know, you're in the local village bus and you bump into that interesting person, but you don't have, make that conversation. And then you think, ah, I wish I had spoken to that person. So it's all those moments of missed serendipity. And when you connect those dots, it's not about regret. It's not about saying, oh, my God, I regret that moment. It's about saying, what is the pattern here? If the pattern, for example, is each of these times I didn't feel worthy to speak with a person.

Or each of those times, I didn't feel, you know, I was afraid of rejection because, you know, someone could shoot down my idea or could say, no, I don't want to talk with you. Now we can work on this deeper pattern. In my case, for example, sense of rejection, I have a fear of that, right? I don't want to be the person who kind of like that gets pushed away in that regard. And so what I found useful is to work on that rejection muscle, to really say, okay, how can I put myself into low-risk situations where I get rejected so that rejection becomes normal? The amount of grant proposals, the amount of university applications, things like that that I had to send out,

where you get rejected all the time, right? And as you do that, you realize, oh, rejection isn't that bad. And then in the future, in those moments, you act more on the kind of moments that present themselves. So that's kind of like, in a way, the first one, I think that's more about the psychological undercurrents. Second one is more about what are some practices in the day-to-day that can help us cultivate serendip. You know, it's practices like the hook strategy where if you ask me, so what do you do, I'm telling you, well, I'm teaching here. But, you know, what's really on my mind at the moment is my two-year-old and my three-year-old because she's not sleeping at night because, you know, she now just learned to negotiate and she was

thinking about the next kind of how she can watch more TV and help me give her what she wants. Things like that where now I'm giving you more options here where you could be like, oh my God, I, you know, also my grandchild now, you know, has something similar, whatever it is. So we find those kind of overlaps of unexpected connection. And then third is really more the social networks, the communities we're part of that can help us with serendibility, right? It can be going to events at the public library to expose ourselves to new people, new networks, things like that. But I'm sure we can talk more about.

But those kind of three levels, I would say, would be the primary ones. On the communities, I mean, you've made the point very aptly in the book that it's not important to know everybody, but it's far more important to know the multipliers, right? And that resonates to me. And explain that. Yeah. So if you think about the world as a network, and in that network, you have super notes, right? So maybe even, you know, depending on what platform you're on, if it's LinkedIn or, you know, other platforms where you will see that some people are okay connected, but other people are those people that have a lot of, you know, connections to people that you might also find interesting.

And so, you know, for example, if I'm interested in spreading an idea at, you know, Stanford or at LSE or somewhere, else, I don't have to go to everyone at that university. I try to go to the president of the local society for X, Y, Z that has relevance. So those people are the multipliers that then can multiply to other people within their community, much more credibly that I could ever do it. And so that's with ideas, that's with other movements related things. So the real idea is to say, who are those kind of supernows, those big dots within a network that if we can work with them, they can bring in a lot of other people into the fold. And I think, you know, we see that in politics, right,

that people focus on people who are the local community leaders. We see that in business, that we try to figure out who are these informal champions within an organization. And a lot of times, it's not necessarily the people who have the greatest title, right? In a company, it might not be the vice president of marketing who has the best overview,

but it might be the one person that just people always go to for advice. And so one thing I do when I go into a new setting is I ask people, who's the person people go to for advice? Because that gives me an indicator. That person seems to be the multiplier. The person who gets in touch with a lot of people. And so if I understand them, I have a better understanding of the community. But also, if I have an idea for them, they could bring it to more people in the local community.

You also mentioned in the book about serendipity being the interaction or intersection amongst three things, right? Coincidence, ambition, and imagination. It's very powerful, I think. And I want to try to put this in the context of my region, Southeast Asia, where most of the people there are not as educated as perhaps the ones in Europe or in the U.S. or whatever. If you take a look at the households in many countries in Southeast Asia, about 80 to 90 percent of the household. are not headed up by somebody with a tertiary education, right? Then you start thinking intuitively that there's likely to be a lack of imagination.

There's a lack of a political culture that encourages the kids, the children, to be proactive in asking the right questions because of that absence or lack of quality education within the heads of the households. Then you take a look at the electorate, those that are voting, right, for the political leaderships at the regional levels, and also at the national level. Same level, 80 to 90% of the populace or electric don't have University of education.

University education. So how do you create this great intersection between coincidence, imagination, and ambition, right? You might have one called coincidence, but you may lack in the other two or one of the other two. talk about that it's it's really interesting in terms of um one of the kind of organizations i've been working with in south africa uh reconstructed living labs what they do is they work with people who had tough periods right so former drug addicts other people who you know there's it's a context

of high crime rate context of low education like essentially the kind of extreme context of of what you described like if you had a continuum and you would say what you just described is here, it would be even a little more extreme than that. And kind of what they've been doing is fascinating. They essentially say, you know what, we do a low-cost education approach here, where it's 10 steps to use social media to build your business, very simple steps. But what they're doing is now, when you're the former drug dealer or former drug user who thought my life amounts to nothing, I will never be anywhere, they see that their neighbor just build a business based on 10 steps of building a business in social media.

So now they have a local role model that achieved something like this. And then they say around this now, we build a community where that person who just built his business will become a teacher. So that person now will teach a class on how to build your business in 10 steps. And so you have a trained-the-trainer-type approach where it multiplies, in this case, to hundreds of thousands of people locally bottom-up. And the reason I find that approach so fascinating is I will never forget the first time I went around 10-ish years ago.

You know, you have to imagine, you know, it's a primarily black community in the Cape Flats in Cape Town, like very impoverished. And then you see on the Table Mountain, on the mountain, you see the kind of University of Cape Town, which is kind of mostly white, right? Mostly, you know, the kind of more privileged ones. And so now what happened is that I went into this community and a boy would tell, would say, well, you know what? a few years ago, we would have never thought we would ever be up there on the mountain

at that university. But now they come to us because we teach them how to use social media. And so the fascinating thing is they not only created a community that now locally teaches those things,

but they made it so interesting that now actually those people who seem to be so far away are actually learning from them. And I think that kind of like turnaround in terms of saying, what do we locally really well? And I think that's the similar

with Indonesia, I've been so inspired where, you know, I think when I look at the amazing social entrepreneurial ventures you have, right, Wasteful Ventures, for example, is a venture that has collaborated with some of our ventures that on my radar, where we're extremely inspired by the local ingenuity and the local resourcefulness that comes out of the country. And so I think that kind of idea that now actually, there's a lot for us to learn of, you know, wasteful ventures, like, how do you do that at scale? Like, how do you actually recycle at scale in local communities, things like that. And so what I always find inspiring is it's not about coming in centrally and saying, let's create a network here, let's create a community and everything will be good. It's

about saying, we're the local champions. A couple of people who could become those local role models who then start locally and that starts to scale. And then I think the magic happens. And so long story short, I think that comes into the idea of if I'm the government, I'm going into a local community and I say, what can I learn from you versus I'm just trying to teach you? because what they do is they make the best out of what is at hand. They see a former director that they see, you're a great teacher because you can teach us about life, you can teach us about creativity,

you can teach us about how to develop networks. And I think that kind of shift away from these are liabilities, these are people who cannot really figure something out to. No, no, no. These are the most resourceful people, but they didn't have an outlet. And here's an outlet now, and this is the outlet that the government and others can help with. And so to me, that's kind of like how big scale change happened,

that you understand that local people, when they don't have a lot of education, they might still be the most resource for creative people. It's just about building a platform around them that they can unleash that kind of potential. I'm with you. I think that this resonates. I mean, number one, there are exceptions, people that have gotten so serendipitously lucky, successful, prosperous, whatever superlatives you can assign to them, right? But I'm much more interested in institutionalizing serendipity at a much larger scale, right?

So in the absence of a university education for most of the households, for most of the electorate in places, not just Indonesia, but many other parts of Southeast Asia, how do you create that necessary political culture within the household, within the office, within the schools, within the social institutions, within the places of worship, so that that necessary content. conversation, not just amongst the leaders within each one of those institutions, but between the leaders and the members, that it, you know, that, that necessary culture of pushing forth smart luck, you know, takes the society to a different level. That, that is, I think, the magic that we're going to need in many developing economies. I completely agree. And I think the fascinating thing is, is that big shift, right, away from, you know, how a lot of development efforts in the past were so unsuccessful because they were just about pushing resources in, right? They were like, here's this and this foundation, here's this and this grant, now just do this and this effort. But then you didn't have, to your point, the motivation or the imagination to say, this is actually what I want to do, what gives me meaning locally. It just was essentially saying, here's something and it developed a certain mentality that wasn't necessarily helpful.

But what I find much more interesting to exactly what you just mentioned is really this idea of How do we build on what people locally are good at, right? So if I look at R-LAPs, for example, right, what I found fascinating is that R-LAPS essentially, they started with baby steps. To your point, they didn't come in and tell everyone, you just have to learn everything and do everything and have this grand vision, but nobody would believe it, right? That's the kind of thing where a local community doesn't take you seriously because they think you just want their votes or you just want, like, you know, you just want to

look good by just engaging with them. But what our labs did was they went in and they said, you know what, baby steps. You come into our office and we don't have a lot of resources, but you will get a freshly brewed coffee because here you get respect, not from your gun, the gun you'll leave outside. Here you get respect from just being a human who wants to learn. And I think that kind of like those small steps where they ingrained their values into how they treat people, how people then feel, oh, the one time a week I go to this office, I feel like, I matter. I feel like I can do something. And that kind of agency that comes from that,

right? That kind of feeling of I am worthy, I can do something. They have then taken into saying, okay, now that you're here, and, you know, again, you're maybe a former drug dealer. So we will now cater a session around how you had a tough, you know, time and now you became a teacher. Now it becomes cool to be a teacher because that person who was the drug dealer, who was the cool kid, now is the teacher. And so I think in my belief, it's a lot about this. kind of local role modeling, a lot about saying who are the people locally who can then turn around a whole community in baby steps. It's not about saying we will modernize everything here. It's about saying, no, no, no, no, no. We need to derisk it for everyone by saying, here's a couple

of small examples of success. Here's a couple of small examples where it worked. And then now we can scale it up because that model of saying, I can locally go to someone, that is very scalable because you can go into every local community and do the same thing with local people rather than with people from the outside. And so I'm a huge believer in this getting away from the old development thinking, which is about pushing something in, pushing people in, pushing resources in to say, no, no, no, no. Instead of looking at people at liabilities, we look at them as something beautiful here where there is resourcefulness. So can we build on that? And then we build on it locally and it becomes their narrative, not our narrative. And I think that kind of then gives that

agency where people say, I can create my own luck because someone outside is not trying to create the luck for me. And I think that's kind of the big shift that. Old school thinking is I have to create luck for people and I have to make them better. And this is like, no, no, no, I want to create a platform for them to create their own luck. And I think that's where it gets interesting. I'm with you. I'm with you. I'm in a camp that's been advocating for recruiting great teachers at any level, elementary, secondary, high school, all the way to tertiary education.

Without which, there's likely to be lack of imagination. Great teachers are ones who can actually provoke their students to be much more imaginative. And I go back to those three criteria, right? Coincidence, ambition, and imagination. And going back to the drug dealers or drug addicts story, I mean, I think the ambition has to be triggered also by some sort of a role model. So how do we actually institutionalize serendipity within a society, you know, at large, so that there's that required imagination, there's that required ambition that's within most of the people. And I think it's, you know, in many societies that are just lacking in terms of the teachers that have great quality and lacking in terms of enough role models in enough multiplier notes,

there's likely to be more incrementalism in achieving or taining serendipity, don't you think? Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more than, I feel, when you know, when you think about teachers, the level of imprinting, the level of power they have over young minds is incredible. And when you think about, I mean, when I think about my own upbringing, where in a way you get educated out of creativity, right? I think Ken Robinson highly recommended he did a wonderful TED talk on this idea that schools, a lot of times educate you out of creativity because they want to put you in a box and then you stay in that box. but you will see that a lot of the most interesting entrepreneurs, they had someone try to break out of that box. And so they actually were quite rebellious in their childhoods.

And I think one of the reasons is because we think about school as this kind of thing of, here's content and you need to take that content, that's not the world we'll live in anymore. And that's what I liked about what you said, that at the end of the day, a teacher is there to make you unleash your own potential and to figure out what could that be and then, you know, give you that imagination, and give you that motivation. And so I think that's kind of like why that,

That example we just talked about is so interesting because it's about saying instead of sending this person in who's so far away, right? If you send a Richard Branson type person into a local impoverished setting and say, this is Richard Branson, be like him. It's too far away, right? It's kind of like I can't picture myself being that. It's just it's too many steps. But if I have the local person who grew up next to me who I always thought, oh my God, this person drifted away, but he now became that teacher and he now is teaching. the people who come from the city here because they want to learn about social media, now essentially you created that kind of ambition and that idea of I can do that also.

If that person can do it, I can do it. And so I think it's that kind of role model on the teacher level that is that you look up to, but it's also the peer where you can track their progress towards that and say, you know what? You're actually growing towards that. And if you can do it, I can do it too. And so I think there's kind of something around this idea of having role models not to be too far away from the person so that they can actually picture themselves in them.

And I think, you know, you have a, I mean, I've always been fascinated by Indonesia because I think, you know, you have such a beautiful melting pot of, you know, different groups where, you know, this idea of like finding some sort of unity in that diversity, right? I think there's a lot in that idea of despite us being slightly different here, we still have a lot of things in common. And one of those is that we want to make a better life for our families. We want to make a better life for the people around us.

And we just need to see the pathways towards that and get some sort of like, you know, opportunity space for doing that. And I think that's kind of like what those kind of models try to help provide. Well, you hit it on a nail. I mean, unity and diversity is a characteristic, not just for Indonesia, I think for Southeast Asia, broadly speaking, with 700 million people, a large $4 trillion economy. I think one of the most serendipitous attributes of Southeast Asia is that we've been so peaceful and stable for the last 2,000 years, right? So we need to attain the other kind of serendipity, which means that, you know, we need to make sure that that educational attainment is at a level that it needs to be for all across, not just one or two countries within Southeast Asia.

And that, I think, is the necessary second or next serendipity that Southeast Asia needs to get. I want to go back to what you alluded to in the book in a context of how a tightly knit community might run the risk of not being serendipitous. Talk about that. I mean, it kind of goes back to that need to be diverse, right, to have diversity as opposed to, you know, call it homogene. or, you know, uniformity, which I think runs the risk of somewhat being less serendipitous than being more diverse. Please. Well, you know, it comes back to that idea of, you know, strong ties versus weak ties in the sense of strong ties is the kind of, you know, people around you who, you know, your friends, like people close to you, there's great, you know, emotional

support. It's people who have your backs. Like, it's the kind of thing. But, but also it might keep you in whatever setting you're in, right? It's the kind of thing. where it's hard to break out of that in terms of ideas or in terms of new people. And then weak ties being more the kind of, you know, the person you know a little bit, it's like maybe, you know, living three villages down or like the person who lives somewhere in the city. And that kind of person, that might be the person that you get the most interesting ideas from because it's out of your usual context. It's out of your usual group.

And I think the most interesting thing comes when we think about how do I for myself create communities that both have those strong ties that, you know, are my anchor. especially also when it comes to, you know, it might be religious, it might be other types of communities where you just feel this is my anchor. So whatever happens in life, I am anchored here. But then on the other hand, also this idea of let me be proactive in terms of how I have a little bit more of those weak ties that can then potentially bring opportunities and new ideas and so on. And so I'm a big fan of, you know, if one lives in a village somewhere or even in the city, and thinking about what are the public places where I can plug in to get access to

those different people, different ideas, right? So if there's a public university, like maybe there's a public event where one goes to that event, and I'm a huge fan of then somehow trying to put myself out there a little bit. So, for example, you know, imagine you go to an event in Jakarta at the university and there's a public event and, you know, great speaker in front of 200 people. And that speaker talks about, hey, you know, trade, Indonesia, and we want to help kind of uplift our people. And now, what you want to be the person who asked the first question in the end, right? And so the way you do that is you get up energetically so that they can't ignore you when they say, oh, time for questions now.

And then you kind of say, well, you know, thank you so much for this very inspiring speech. So you make it all about the speaker and all about this, this was so, so interesting. As someone who, you know, grew up in this and this village and wanted to explore this and this, what would you advise someone like me to do? Or something like this where you built that hook and you built that idea in that there's an information point here. And it is amazing. It is amazing how there's always four, five, six people out of the audience afterwards coming to the person saying, oh my God, like I also grew up in that village and now I'm here in the city. I want to help you out. I do this and this now, I want to help you out. So the point here is, and the reason I'm telling you

this, and of course, depending on different settings, right, there might not be the opportunity to ask a question, but I'm telling this because I think developing that potentiality space, that space for potential opportunity where other people can see the overlaps, that is up to us a lot of times to put ourselves out there in some sort of way. It can be an event like this. It can be linked in, like just sometimes I'm putting a couple of information points. But it's just the idea of let's make it more likely that there are these weak ties that can emerge from people saying, oh my God, you're interested in this? I don't live in your village at the moment. I'm not in your strong network, but we have that in common, but also I'm somewhere else now. And so that's kind of the

weak tie then that becomes really interesting in life where you are, you know, in a way united in that you have something in common here, but also you're sufficiently different, that that person also could now have good ideas that are different from what you have at the moment. Interesting. How does failure affect serendipity? Or how does a series of failures affect serendipity? How do you make somebody not give up after slipping once or twice so that he or she, you know, attains the necessary serendipity in life. I think there's three things to it. And it, you know, builds on what you said earlier around education that I couldn't agree

with you more that at the core of everything we talk about is education in the sense that education, not in the sense of content. Again, you don't need a mathematical formula in order to live a happy life, right? Like, maybe your life will be happier if you know a lot of formulas, but or actually maybe not. It depends. But point is, the content itself won't not make a difference, but the mindset piece will. The mindset piece in terms of how do I cope with different situations, have I done something in the past that has worked, and how can I build on that? And so I think to your question, there's three pieces. One is the question of, can I meaning make a situation?

So when I am in a tough situation, and that's the Victor Franco idea, can I still see some sort of meaning in the situation? So to give an example, my mother-in-law, she is the kind of person who create serendipity wherever she goes. And, you know, she had a small accident, right? So kind of small car accident, the kind of situation where usually would go, oh my God, like this is a bad situation. This was not lucky. This was unlucky, right? This was a failure of driving in a way. She's the kind of person who then talks with the other person, makes friends with that person, that person then invites her husband on the podcast of that person. It's a big podcast in the US. and that person kind of much more visibility.

Long story short, she meaning made that situation. She said, you know what? I will not let that situation define now as this is a bad situation and we are both now depressed about it, but she said, can I still find something in there? And again, you know, that's very different from toxic positivity of saying everything will always be good. Not at all.

Like, you know, we talked about the wildfires recently here where our house burned down. Those things, they're painful. They're disastrous. They feel really bad. And then the question is, what can I still? control. Can I meaning make it and say, what is the next step now? And so in her case, it would be, can I still talk with that person? Maybe it's an interesting person. In our case, it's, you know, can we still, like, now write a paper about this event and now somehow maybe that kind of like

we learn something from it. So really that kind of meaning making, I think, is the first one. The second one, I think, comes more to resilience in the sense of, you know, Adam Grant has done some fantastic work around this idea of how do you develop the tenacity to really, you know, be able to cope with, especially hard situations, right? Failure, but also loss. And so one thing is really about this idea of when you look back in 10, 15 years from now, will it still matter? And if not, you know, should you be too concerned about it? But also more importantly, when you are in a tough situation, thinking about, have I been in something similar like this before? Have I gone through it? And then kind of seeing, oh,

actually, you know, I can do this again. I can go through this again. All right. I had a bad exam. Okay, I had a bet it back then, but you know what? I'm still alive, right? And so kind of building on this again. And so I think there's this kind of aspect of building a muscle for resilience and so on. And then the third aspect, I think, which is, you know, one of the most important aspects is the kind of people we surround ourselves with. If you are in a culture in an organization, in a local setting where people frame failure as the worst thing in the world, that will always be the framing. It's quite tough to break out of this. But if you kind of try to build a couple of contacts also that maybe see it more as learning opportunities and things like that, then you will see that those people also will be the people who will go with you on your growth journey. Because a lot of times those strong ties are also the ones who might not be that used to you actually growing out of whatever setting you're in, versus the weak ties are the ones who are actually then like, okay, great, like you can grow this way and you can get out here. So long story short, I think there is something in there around this idea of how do we, we think more proactively about what kind of setting we want to put ourselves into and what kind

of framing people use in that setting. And you will see that in good corporate cultures also that, you know, failure is being reinterpreted into this was an experiment or this was a learning opportunity rather than a failure. And then people will look back and say those failures were the most interesting inflection points. We went almost bankrupt, right? In my case, we went almost bankrupt with one company. But there was a final wake-up call to say, you know what?

we can finally change our business model and make something more interesting out of it. And so what was almost a failure then became an opportunity again. And I think that kind of like reframing is extremely powerful. I see so many people falling into this, I call it, pessimism aversion trap. Right. They don't want to try something that's new. And I tend to think within intuition that these people, well, sometimes I fall into that. trap too in that the lack of ability to think long term I think puts you in that spot right and the

lack of being able to think long term puts you in a spot of not being able to be proactive in search of you know that positivity you know if you hit a car and you get into an accident there might be wisdom in actually talking to the other guy and who knows that that guy might be you know the son or the daughter of whatever whatever that may be of virtue to whatever you you try and achieve midterm or long term. And I think that lack of proactivity is, you know, manifested in so many people that very easily fall into this, you know, pessimism, pessimism aversion trap. I want to take, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

And sorry, and I think that's such a, like, interesting point because, you know, when you think about exactly that also in the context of when people say, I'm an unlucky person, right? Yeah. or I'm someone who tends to have bad, you know, things happen in life. The fascinating thing I think is to then work with baby steps and say, because you can never, like, if someone is not a proactive person, it's very like hard, right, to go to them and say, be more active, be more proactive. Like, that will usually get like a pushback and say, no, no, you don't understand my life. Like, I have all these difficult things here. Like, who are you to tell me like all these different things and X, Y, Z?

And then what I found extremely interesting is when you have baby steps where you tell the person, for example, okay, let's make a deal. The next 10 times you are in a difficult situation. I want you to think about one thing, one thing that in this situation now could somehow change your life to the better, whatever it could be. So in a car accident, right, to exactly your point. Okay, this could be the son of the prime minister and, you know, maybe exos that kind of interesting thing can happen. or, you know, the family car on the way to the holidays breaks down. Everyone is stuck in the car. Everyone's, like, annoyed.

But maybe it's the first time you can finally have the conversation you always had to have as a family. Like those kind of things where I wanted to think of one thing that is meaningful, not necessarily positive or optimistic or anything, but just meaningful. Is there one meaningful thing I can do? And as you do that a couple of times, you will see that your brain reframes itself. That's the kind of beautiful thing of neuroplasticity, right? that we can train our brain to rewire itself. And so I think there's all these baby steps we can do

where I'm completely with you that the most amazing thing comes when someone sees, oh, wow, my life will be better and I have control over it. Because I think a lot of people have said, no, no, I can't. Like, this is not under my control. But once you see that more things than you think are under your control, you see it happening.

And I told you, I think in our pre-talk, this example of my colleague, right, who, you know, he was this eminent professor. And he's kind of the opposite example also in terms of he wouldn't need anything because he already has everything. But he's the kind of person who, you know, eminent professor, and he would be like Christian, I love you, I love your research. But why would I need those kind of things? Like, you know, what's the point?

And so we made a deal. And we said, you know what? The next couple of weeks, just go out there and ask slightly different questions instead of asking, so what do you do at an event or so? ask, what do you enjoy doing? So very simple twist, but it allows people to get out of their autopilot of, oh, I am this and this, like the robotic thing to, oh, I enjoy this and this. And then you find all these unexpected overlaps and a couple of hooks. So essentially, hey, I am X, Y, Z, but what I'm really interested in is this and this. And so kind of, you know, give that opportunity space of

people getting to know you on a meaningful level. He does that for a couple of weeks. He comes back and he says, well, Christian, I didn't know life can be so joyful. And, you know, to me, that was really the thing that I could, like, you know, I think I'm a relatively, you know, I'm a relatively interactive person, so I think I can usually get people excited about something. But even with him, like, it was never possible to just tell him, David, like, this is all the possibilities. He had to experience it for himself. And as he started experiencing it, he was like, wow, this actually works and I can do it myself. And so I think I'm a big fan in this kind of like, just putting people into low-risk, small situations where they can do it.

train these things a little, and then actually they fill their glass without having to think about, oh, I'm a glass half full guy or go. They are like, no, no, I'm just doing it. And then actually it starts to happen. And so I think the kind of experiential piece is the piece that I've seen work very well there. You know, it kind of sounds that it's important to, or more important to be able to think longitudinally, as opposed to latitudinally, right? And in the absence of somebody that could provoke someone else to think more longitudinally, what do you do?

Do you just rely on coincidence or you rely on luck? You rely on, you know, godly intervention? I mean, there's got a way, there's got to be a way to institutionalize, right? The ability for everybody to think more longitudinally as opposed to latitudinally. try out this different dimension that's within the horizon. widen yourself, diverge yourself. I mean, that's kind of like what I'm getting implicitly from what you're trying to, you know, say here. How do you do that, Christian?

A hundred percent. And, you know, one thing that I do a lot with my students is to say, you're coming in here and you might think I want to apply to the Big Four consultancies or I want to be ex-a-z banker or, you know, there's a certain idea of like, this is the one unidimensional thing that I think is supposed to happen with my life and like this is what I'm going for. And so then we're talking about, you know what? How do you even know? How can you know what you might enjoy the most?

How can you know what is most meaningful to you without actually trying it? And so, you know, what I tell them is like, look, like, yes, of course, let's send applications to the big four consultancies or whatever kind of consultancy or bank or whatever you're interested in. But then also send an application over here. send an obligation over here. Just like, you know, talk with a couple of people here. Put yourself into situations and get a feel for what kind of person do you want to be surrounded with. And as they do that, right, it's fascinating how a few of them would be like, oh my God, like,

I always assumed that this is my trajectory because that's how I grew up or, you know, this is how it's supposed to be. But then I realized my people actually, you know, those people who are like the entrepreneurs or the artists or whatever it is. And so I think it's the interesting thing of the more. exposure one has to different types of settings, the more they can practice what you just mentioned in terms of really understanding, I could be different people, I could be different personas, I could be, you know, going different ways. And the only way to really know it is not

to think about it or to watch, you know, a video about it or so, but to actually put ourselves into those situations. That's why I'm such a big fan of going to public events and things like that, just to test out a little, who are the kind of people I enjoy actually being around with and then can I somehow, you know, develop connections with them so that I spend more time with them and less time with the people that I thought I would spend time with, but actually maybe are not really my tribe. And, you know, I've always found that idea of tribe so interesting because, you know, you, you know, in the context of Indonesia, of course, you know, you also, you know, you have the idea of tribes, but also then there's the intellectual tribe, right? So there's

a tribe by birth, and then there's a tribe by kind of like what you're really excited about. And I think what you mentioned earlier about motivation and ambition, I think that a lot of times comes from finding our intellectual tribe or finding our tribe that somehow relates more to the ideas that we really interested in versus just our background. You know, I could make a case economically that specialization is somewhat correlated with inequality. Right. and at the rate that more and more people become specialized, while others don't, the others become less serendipitous. The specialist become more serendipitous, right? So how do you bring about serendipity for people as a whole? If only some choose to be a specialist and others choose not to be specialists, on the basis of the argument that specialization

leads to economic inequality. When you think about it in a way that, so expertise, right, if you think about specialization, expertise, yes, it can help us with serendivity, right? Because, I don't know, Fleming only was able to discover penicillin because he has a pre-knowledge of what that could look like or what something could look like, and then he connects the dots and makes sense. Or, you know, understanding gravity when an apple falls down comes from understanding the bigger idea behind what it means when an apple falls down. So there is a lot to be said about expertise

helping with things. I do think, though, when I work in different types of settings, a lot of times those people who are more generalistic, those people who are maybe not that deep in, they actually connect a lot of dots because they are not functionally fixed. They are not too deep in whatever they are in. And so I think there's a lot to be said in terms of saying, you know what, in almost every setting we can cultivate serendipity. We can cultivate opportunity spaces. But I think you're raising a really important point, which is the kind of societal inequality that comes just from, you know, how people have access to different types of skill sets, different types of education, different types of, you know, monetary resources and so on. And so in fact, a lot of

our work is around this idea of, you know, if you would, if you picture the world as kind of like the social structures, everything that is the environment, right? So monetary, education, everything else. And then the kind of agency, right? So what can you do on yourself? You want to, you want to come up here. You want to have a lot of social structure that's supportive, and you want to have your own mindset that kind of like does the most with whatever is in your environment. And what I'm fascinated by is as a government, we can work on both. We can bring the social structure up by saying we can, if we think about, for example, education, we're not only thinking about giving someone a scholarship. And then again, prejudiced them later because, you know, while their other friends get a job because they also are all connected, they again might then be slower in the race because they got to the university. but still don't have the connections that their friends have, things like that.

So if you put someone into university, also think about their opportunity space in terms of give them three mentors who are like high leverage mentors or just something that in a way really builds that social structure. But at the same time, don't stop there because the mindset component, getting to the mindset piece, that's actually what will help them to make the best out of this. And so that's why I'm so focused on saying every school, every university, I believe in the world should have a course that is the foundations of developing, a serendipity mindset or developing an opportunity mindset

because at the end of the day, look, everything else you can train yourself. Like most things you can train yourself in, right? You can train yourself in a lot of things in the world. But the idea that you are able to identify an opportunity, that you're able to see the adverse as a potential opportunity. That is something that is a superpower. And so I think whatever situation someone is, you know,

wherever a school is located, I think that has to be the core to say, how can we now get that kind of like opportunity? that entrepreneurial thinking into into their minds. And so I'm a big fan of thinking about it both. And I agree with you that if there's over, you know, if there's over specialization with some people,

it might take away. And at the same time, I think we can create that opportunity space that makes it possible. I think that starts again with education. Well, I'll pick up on that. Let me use the internet.

The internet, you know, decades ago, was designed to help democratize information And it's done a great job, democratizing information. But what I've discovered would have been that the Internet has not done a commensurate democratization of ideas, right? It has democratized information, but it hasn't democratized ideas. It has actually polarized ideas.

So when you polarize ideas at both ends of the spectrum, those in between the extremes of the spectrum are those that are, unfortunately, exposed to less serendipity if I can use your thinking, right? And I have basically been thinking that this lack of democratization of ideas is also somewhat correlated with the lack of democratization of economic capital. right? I mean, capital has been abundant at the rate that, you know, the modern economic, you know, countries have been, you know, very robustly growing, very robustly, you know, doing quantitative easing. So I would make the argument that, you know, economic capital has been very abundant, but that abundance has not been manifested in a proper distribution or redistribution. into as many people as need be. So I would argue that some have been more serendipitous than others

in the context of being a beneficiary of that economic capital. So how do you deal with that? What comes to mind when you were speaking was around this idea of at the end of the day, who is encouraging something or who sets the incentive? What are the incentives? So when you think about development, right, or when you think about the kind of broader scope of, I mean, I know it a lot in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, right, where you would have certain situations who have

certain kind of funds and then those funds get distributed, but everyone has their own incentives, right? Someone wants to distribute funds just to be able to say, we gave ex-wasat country these and these funds, or we gave X-WZ ventures these and these funds, and that's where their impact stops, right? That, like, they essentially just distributed money. And so you can imagine that then the distribution just becomes completely perverted in the sense of that it lands everywhere where it shouldn't land. But what I've been fascinated is how do you shift away from just looking at like what's the inputs here?

What are we putting somewhere to what are the actual outcomes over the long run? Like what is actually happening and then who's being held accountable for it? And, you know, I will not forget, you know, when I worked with education institutions in sub-Southern Africa where you would have some that would educate, you know, for example, one class of boys, and then the funders would all be like, oh, great, great, great, everything went well. They went back to DC or wherever they came from. And then you would see that those kids would have a problem to reintegrate, for example, because now they were the kids who were so smart that nobody would understand the big words

they're using. And so now they get ostracized, right? And so you have all these unintended consequences. And so I guess there's two points to this. A is that I think the inequality of how financial things are being dispersed based on different incentive structures and so on, create so much inequality in itself. But then also I think the focus on inputs and like what you put somewhere and simple outputs versus, you know, hey, great, we educated 50 boys versus what are the actual outcomes? These 50 boys now being ostracized by the local community is net actually probably negative for them in the long, in the short run at least. And so I think what I've been advocating a lot for is really a shift towards understanding the true outcomes of what money does

and what money tries to do. But also then people, being accountable for it because I think the way a lot of governments work and a lot of especially NGOs work is they are it's it's more about simple input simple outputs but then essentially nobody being held accountable about the actual outcomes because you know they are harder to measure they are more long term and so on and so it's hard to hold someone accountable who's kind of like in that but I think there's so many reasonable correlations nowadays where you can say okay if you have this and this this output. So if you have 50 students who are being educated in this and this area, in similar contexts, we know that they usually get ostracized or they usually get this. Then you have reasonable

correlations to an outcome. And I just hope that we will have more and more evidence-based kind of interventions there that are actually more about truly caring about the outcome versus just caring about being able to say, I help 50 people here, which makes you feel good, but actually, you know, it doesn't really help a local community. And so the long story short of, I I've seen a lot of financial capital actually destroy local communities because you give money in, you create more societal inequality in the local community and actually didn't really understand the local dynamics. Well, I would make the argument that there have been very obviously rising inequalities of wealth, income and opportunities. In addition to these three economic phenomena, there is also this rising central patalism with economic development.

there's a greater acceleration or velocity of growth within the primary cities as opposed to the secondary, much less regional cities or towns. These economic phenomena just tell me that there has been a proper distribution or redistribution of serendipity. So, I mean, serendipity, I think, is a public good that needs to be distributed. And I'm in a camp that believes that democracy should not just be manifested in distribution of power. But it needs to be manifested in distribution of public goods. Call that intellect, welfare, health care, social value, moral value. And the last bit out of that, serendipity. It needs to be properly distributed as part of a thriving democracy.

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here, Christian. As we're talking, I'm beginning to just start thinking something new. But what's your view on this? what you know I'm completely with you especially also you know what you had mentioned in our pre-conversation around when we think about the idea of compound serendivity or the idea of of of of the baseline you have predetermines a lot of what comes next right so it's like that's the kind of unfairness in general right about the like financial system right you like I've always tried to explain to you know when I speak with my students about microfinance that at the end of the day the weird thing about banks was that you need money in order to get money. Like you can only... And so those people really actually need money

don't get money because they don't have collateral. So, you know, the initial idea of microfinals then being, you know what? Like maybe we can distribute actually... Maybe we can have a social collateral. Well, people socially somehow say, you know what, we will, as a couple of people in the village, be held accountable for paying back the loan.

And so we don't need to give you a house as a collateral. We give our reputations as a collateral. Right? those kind of things where then you start to more and more see, okay, we can actually have other people get access to these financial opportunities. And I think it's similar to serendivity that at the end of the day, if the baseline is too low in whatever context you're in, by definition, you will most likely not have enough serendivity. And by definition, then, have not enough opportunity and enough kind of like, in a way, meaningfulness in life to experience. And so I think I'm completely with you. I think when you think about how do you create those opportunity spaces of serendipity,

that in the end of the day, create the joy, create the meaning, but also create the financial success, how do we create those opportunity spaces? And so I think that's where, in a way, the lack of imagination also on a more macro level, that people tend to think mostly about money distribution, rather about opportunity distribution, right, thinking about, hey, okay, if I have a local village, how do I now create that local school and at the same time when I have the local school, I need to think about how's the local employer now employing those people from the school or how is, so building that ecosystem, right? And I'm a big fan of ecosystems for that reason that in a way they try to understand

like in nature that if you only have one aspect of it, like the rest will die because you need some sort of like cycle here. And so, you know, I've worked a lot with governments who wanted to try to copy Silicon Valley, for example, right? And I've always found that fascinating because my core point to them was you're trying to copy a couple of institutions. You're trying to say, we want a Stanford here and we want a Google here. And then you've got to also understand that there's an underlying culture. And if you don't have that culture of collaboration, that culture of actually, you know, sharing your ideas with each other, whatever it is, then this ecosystem will not work.

And so the long story short, I think to your point is that I think a true serendivity mindset that allows for true prosperity means thinking more holistic. means thinking in systems, means thinking that if you replicate one institution, you need to think about how that institution fits into the rest, but also what is the foundation of it? And that foundation is mindset and culture. And if you don't also shift mindset and culture, all these institutions won't work at the level that you want them to work. You talked about this in the book.

Don't bother copycatting the extremes. Just copycat the patterns, right? Talk a little bit more about, you know, the importance of basically emulate. the patterns as opposed to the personalities. Because I find this quite a lot with, you know, the young generation members. They try to copy you verbatim as opposed to trying to copy the patterns with which, you know, some of the successful personalities, you know, go by. Yeah, I mean, if you take successful people, right, take the software billionaire who, like,

if you would just follow their track of how they became the CEO of one of the biggest software companies in the world and stuff like that, you might miss that they also had the help of their parents who connected them in the first place to venture capitalists and to kind of key people who then actually help them out do that. And so the point here is that A, those hero stories a lot of times are either flawed or they don't tell the whole story. And so just copying it sets you up for failure because there's necessarily always other aspects that we're not aware of. and if you don't exactly do exactly those things, it won't work. More importantly, also the context is most likely very different from one's own context,

so it will not likely work. And so I'm a big fan of exactly that to think about what are the patterns that I see in that person when I compare them with 20 other inspiring people and then try to distill what they actually did versus what their context did for them. And so once you see that pattern, you might be like, okay, great, that was all about perseverance. Okay, I can do something about perseverance. This was all about, they all somehow reached out to one particular venture capitalist. Okay, great, I can try that now.

But this idea of, like, once I understand the pattern behind something, I can do something about it, that might be more replicable than the one story of a person. And there's a wonderful researcher Chenguel Liu. He does a lot of work around luck. And one of his key points is that if you overfocus on the most successful person, that person most likely is not so easy to be copied because they also took over proportional risk a lot of times. And so that might not be the kind of person you can learn so much from, right?

Because if you have, you know, for example, a current world leader, right, who either becomes president or has a really tough other outcome, like those kind of things, like it's a lot of risk taking. Versus if you look at the consistent second best, so the people who are consistently doing really good work, those are better to be copied because they are more reliable in that their journey actually followed a certain pattern than just kind of like random lucked by the draw

or like some outside benefit that they got at some point. And so there's a lot in that idea that don't trust too much in those absolute rock stars because, again, there was usually something in their life that kind of gave them the way up or there was some sort of like freak accident or something like that. But the ones who are like consistently doing good work,

they are the ones to learn most from. People have no idea how many sacrifices would have been made by people that would have gone to the top. I mean, you know, people just look at the, you know, the good side of the story, but the bad side of the story is typically not revealed. But I want to, you mentioned very aptly the importance of multidimensionality, as opposed to unidimensionality. And I want to put this in the context of AI.

I talk to quite a number of people out here who venture and are stewards of AI. What I get the sense off is that they don't like to multidimensionalize the narrative, especially the technologist, right? They seem to think with a bit of hubris that they know everything that needs to be known about all the other dimensions, whether it relates to the environment, spirituality, philosophy, economic, sociology, and all that good stuff, right? And that's a common feature of what I find with the technologists who've been so good at pushing forth this AI narrative. How does that impact serendipity for society going forward at the rate that it seems at the moment to be somewhat more unidimensionalized as opposed to adequately multidimensionalized?

That's fascinating because we've done a paper recently about artificial intelligence and AI and trying to figure out in what way does AI actually help us create serendipity? So, you know, AI is really good at connecting dots, right, is really good at saying, hey, you know, especially if you have the right prompts, right, if you make it open-ended enough, you can, in a way, have a lot of what we would call kind of more traditional innovation happen through AI and sometimes kind of even unexpected things if we interact with it. But at the other end, also there's so much pattern dependence, right? And there's so much kind of like idea in there that AI can't experience surprise, right? It can't really experience the idea of, oh, this is something

that kind of like is truly surprising and joyful in that surprise. And so, you know, one of the things is that I'm quite fascinated by is this kind of how do you augment machine and person in the sense that the machine kind of helps with connecting a lot of dots, but still leave space for the human to experience a surprise in there. And I think that to me is where hopefully we're going, that we're building organizations that are able to say, on one hand, here is a pre-programmed thing, search for something, but also tell me the anomalies, tell me the things that I might not have expected or that could point to it.

And we talked about this, I think, in the pre-talk that, you know, I'm one of my favorite questions in the company setting is, what surprised you last week? If you're asking this in a corporate setting, your team, what surprised you last week? It's amazing because they would say, oh, it was really surprising that our customers used our washing machine to wash their potatoes. Like, oh, that was surprising. Great. Let's make it a potato washing machine. And that actually, right?

So then kind of like interesting new things happen. And so once you prime people towards that, they look out for those anomalies. And I think, you know, hopefully we can prime AI enough to also still look out for anomalies because I think that's where a lot of joy and meaning comes from. from kind of the anomalies in life. And I mean, I've also, you know, in your life, like I feel like because you've created so much serendivity in your life, right? If you, if you would connect the dots at hindsight, I'm sure there's, there's, you know, it's almost like for AI then to meaning make your life

and to somehow kind of like predict for you what you will find surprising now, there's a lot in there in your multidimensionality that will take AI quite some time, right, to figure out. And so I think in your case, that was actually a question I had for you also, how you, for yourself, think about the pieces we talked about serendivity on the bigger level, right now with technological change like AI, with how the world is changing, with everything else. Like, where do you feel the biggest impact of serendivity could come, if that makes sense? I'm actually a little concerned. I mean, I kind of, you know, talked about this earlier with you with respect to the line.

of democratization of economic capital on the back of abundance right so despite abundance it's not fairly distributed and we're seeing empirically you know economic inequalities by way of wealth opportunity and income and then also central fatalism of economic development right the primary cities seem to be moving at a faster rate than the secondary and and regional cities at the advent of this massive commoditization of intelligence and labor on the back of AI and on the back of robotics. So at the rate that the price of labor becomes zero or near zero, at the rate that the price of intelligence near zero, we're likely to see abundance of intelligence and labor, right? So I'm concerned as to whether or not this type of abundance

is going to end up the way economic capital abundance ended up. Right. So we've got to fight it off with institutionalizing serendipity, you know, at a broader and greater and deeper level. I mean, you know, just just thinking out loud. That's my knee-jerk reaction to all this. And, you know, there are so many developing economies out there that are exposed to manual labor that's going to be dislocated by robotics. they're exposed to so much manual labor that's susceptible to dislocation by AI. What's going to happen to these people at the rate that they're not going to be able to be easily reskilled or upskilled?

They're going to be less serendipitous than those that have the necessary specialist capabilities to push forth, robotics, AI, and the way we've seen with the capitalist that have been. so great at moving capital forth with this kind of abundance, which unfortunately hasn't been disabuted to many parts of the world. Yeah. That's fascinating because it's, you know, it makes me think of that if you think about where people draw meaning from, a lot of times it might be, right, from intelligence, it might be from doing work, it might be from doing good work. And as that is now shifted more and more, right, that kind of like, what is that void that could potentially be there and what fills in. I remember in our pre-conversation we talked about spirituality and those kind of themes. And I think to me that that is actually a really fascinating point also

in terms of what is the kind of voids that you're filling by having some sort of connectivity if it's not only to your job anymore now in that kind of way or whatever. What is it? Is it nature? Is it religion? Is it other types of ways? And so I feel it's a fascinating time also to think about what are the anchors for people that are there if Work either becomes an even stronger anchor for those who are kind of deep diving and then less so for people who might go into where there might be a shift. And so I feel there's a lot of probably macro thinking to be done around what are the actual anchors that help meaning make life going forward. Well, the ideal is to top down it, right, on the hope or with the hope that the guy at the top has a necessary wisdom. but in the absence of that wisdom

you've got to bottom up it but as much as you want to bottom up it if the bottom don't have the necessary intellectual wherewithal then you've got to rely on sort of like the middle segment the middle segment also has limitations when it comes to achievement

of tertiary education so as much as you want to just rely on this bottoming up of the necessary political culture to create more serendipity so that people or the kids become more proactive and seeking opportunities and talking to multipliers within communities and all that. But the heads of the households, the heads of the communities, don't

have that kind of thinking for the most part. Some do have. So I think we've got to figure out a way to pipe this knowledge, you know, in a broader way, in a deeper way, in a whatever way, that's going to translate into better wisdom within the middle and the bottom. Yeah. That comes back to the systems, right? In terms of like, I think traditionally when you think about, for example, educational interventions,

you would think about here's a 10-year-old goal or boy, let's educate them. But actually, the more enlightened approach might be, well, let's think about the whole family, right? let's think about, yes, if I educate the 10-year-old boy, what else does the family need now to go with that education? And maybe there could be a real education of the whole family, or at least, you know, I've seen unintended consequences where when kids out of less privileged environments get sent to school, now, you know, they did some work at home. And so now there's a financial kind of problem here. And so really thinking about cross-subsidization then or things that in a way

truly enable it. And I think that's what I feel has been lacking in general, kind of like a more holistic idea of what are the actual outcomes for a community, for family, when there is an educational intervention, A, and then B, I'm a huge fan of social franchising. So to what you just said, right, this idea of top down versus bottom up, how do we find a middle way? And, you know, when you think about something like McDonald's, right, for good or bad, like McDonald's, right, here's the brand, here's the quality, here's like a stamp. I'm not eating with McDonald's. don'ts anymore, but in general, right? It's the kind of thing where it's just fascinating how as a, as a, as a, as a, as a company, they were able to say, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's,

here's what we're good at. And then here's how we locally, uh, adjusted, how, how a local franchisee. So a local person can make it their own business. And if you're in a particular context where people can't eat pork, then there's a hamburger without pork or there's like no hamburger and things like that, right? And so social franchising really being this idea then that you say, if I'm an and I go into a local context. Here is local teachers that can help me. They build it as a local business or a local school, but still like we have a branding that helps them across different areas,

things like that, where you combine the top down and the bottom up. I'm a huge fan of trying to figure out those approaches because it's in a way you give the locals a little bit of risk and responsibility at the same time. And, you know, I've always found it fascinating with this R-Labs that I mentioned earlier, how they've been doing it. They go into a local community and they, By celebrating the local leaders and celebrating the local achievements, you have a lot of community

cohesion because everyone now is part of, like, owns it, right? And that local ownership to me makes all the difference to not say, here's a transaction, here's a monetary flow or a content flow coming in, but this is a community effort here, and we're doing this together. And that to me is where a lot of that cohesion will come from to say, at the end of the day, we need to do it together. And that's, I think the early microfinance is an interesting example of, like, this idea of have a community come together to together get access to something and then work together to pay it back. And then there's unintended consequences sometimes that we have to mitigate.

But long story short is, I think it's exactly what you say, that combining the top down and the bottom up in smart ways and not leaving it to a couple of people in the middle. One of the unintended consequences is really not being able to innovate, right? And I'm in a cab that believes that innovation will require open-mindedness. And only with open-mindedness can you actually combine the force of preservation and the force of innovation. And we've seen this in nations, civilizations that have failed because they've basically failed to show open-mindedness as to combine the force of preservation and the force of innovation. they got less serendipitous, right? And that's the argument I would make. You talked about open-mindedness, but you also talked about,

which something that I think is very interesting, the attribution bias. I mean, you know, serendipity is really about the degree of difficulty of something, the effort that you put into it, and also the skill sets that you have. And to the extent that, you know, you have very little of those, you tend to blame it on bad luck, you know, for not being able to achieve. Go ahead, Christian. Talk about that. Yeah.

Well, and, you know, building on that, it's also fascinating how people can make exactly the same decision. And depending on if it goes well or not so well, people will say they were either skilled or not skilled, right? We see that a lot with CEOs where they make similar decisions. And then when it works out there, like, oh, my God, this was the best CEO ever. The other one made exactly the same decision, but in another context and gets fired because they messed it all up.

And so it's fascinating, I think, to see how we attribute success and failure in different ways and depending on settings. But to your point, I think, you know, when you think about the attributing something, right, do I attribute my success to luck or to hard work, things like that, right? When people think about those kind of questions, I think the level of how people talk about it versus what they believe, right? So you will find a lot of high-powered leaders saying, oh, I was lucky that this and this happened.

But actually, you know that they actually believe they worked really hard for it. They just wanted to sound modest, right? And so it's the kind of thing where what they're saying versus what they think is actually, no, no, no, I actually worked really hard for this. And at the same time, right, if you look at Obama, for example, he would talk a lot about, hey, look, like, I had a lot of serendivity in my life and I want to sprinkle that to other people, right? Because it's the kind of thing that really enables people to make a lot of good things happen.

And so attribution just like becomes a down. dangerous and difficult if we attribute hard work to people who had a lot of privilege first, and then somehow, you know, we think, oh my God, yes, like they really did something great here, but they didn't really work for it a lot. But I think for our case, it's much more interesting to think about where the people who have a lot of certainty really happen, where they might say, oh, I was just lucky, but actually they worked really hard for it. And I think that comes back from, you know, either work or luck. No, no, no, no. It's not either hard work or luck, but it's is working really hard to be luckier.

And I think that's why, you know, I mentioned earlier with your life, I think is a great example, right? Where people don't see what behind the scenes, like you're, you know, like it's the kind of, you know, when you see like a lake and you have a duck on the lake and like you see the chilled duck on the top, but then like the legs, right? Like, yeah, right, because you're constantly working and working. And I think that's the kind of thing where sometimes people then feel underappreciated when people say, well, you were just lucky. No, no, no, no, no.

I worked really hard to be lucky. And so I think it's those kind of things where trying to understand and parsing out what is really luck versus what is the hard work that went into that luck. And that's why I find serendipity so interesting as like the muscle for the unexpected that you're building that makes it more likely also in the future that you will be lucky. And then hopefully you attribute some of that also to the hard work that made it more lucky. I want to take this to the geopolitical level. We're seeing a new kind of multipolarity. where the pre-existing superpowers, you know, call it the U.S., and now China, and then there's a set of developing economies that are much larger than they ever used to be,

you know, decades ago. They want to exert this kind of revisionism, right? And with this new kind of multipolarity, how do you see serendipity falling into the picture? You know, I see it mostly when you think about the story of big, ideas but also of big collaborations, partnerships, how, you know, it was always somehow people that did it. And so when I think about serendipity in the context of global affairs, I think a lot about the kind of serendipitous things that, you know, that's why I found things like Davos or so always interesting to look at in terms of how people think it's

the kind of content part that is important. That's not the important thing, right? It's not that like in this conference hall, the content, like it's, they put a bit of content there. It's the networking. But yeah, the networking, but more importantly, the serendipitous thing that everyone is in one village, right? So all the key people in the world or all of the key people in the world for one week are in one small little village and they walk around and they bump into each other. And then there's like, oh my God, hey, you know, this conflict.

Oh, we didn't even know you're interested in this. Like, we can help you solve this. Oh, let's do this. And so the amount of serendipity that happens. happens when you bring diverse people together in a small space like this. And so to me, a lot of times when I think about global affairs, I think about serendipity in terms of the official story people will tell us is, exquisite country and exquisite country for 10 years have been working on this big thing and now we did it and make it

and make it happen. And so it's a linear story. Nah, they met over a glass of red wine in Davos. They randomly came up with this idea. They then told their press secretary to come up with a story of how we can make this, you know, a public thing and then go forward, right? And so my point is I think I'm fascinated by how many stories in the world will start serendibitous, but people brush it out of the stories because it might feel a bit more random than the kind of, yeah,

we planned it for a long time. But a lot of the big things, a lot of the, you know, changing trade relationships and things are because one leader met this other leader and then they picked this up or they had a phone call, right, at the moment with tariffs and like someone had a phone call with this person, but then another person was in the room who said this and then this happened. So it's fascinating how serendipity happens, especially in a world that is so in flux. And I think you see that especially in the US, I think as well, that when you have a system in flux where everything is being questioned, right?

Every rule is being questioned. Everything is rather how an entrepreneur usually would be in a startup context, that then actually serendipity and semblendity both happen more. So serendivity happens more because there's someone in the room, they say, oh, my God, we could also do this, and it just gets done because it's the kind of setting where people just do it then. Versus semblanity can also happen, right? The kind of like bad luck by design where then there might be unintended consequences by doing something and then something kind of working out differently. So I think there's a lot of these kind of fascinating dynamics around how in those, in a multipolar world where everything is shifting and changing. when so many variables are in flux,

it's very likely that something unlikely happens that can be either good or bad. And so that's what I find fascinating about systems that the improbable becomes very probable because you have so many improbable events now that could happen, that one of them will happen at some point. And then we're all surprised, oh, my God, how could this happen? But it was very likely that something unexpected would happen.

And so that's how I think about global relations now in terms of I'm mostly cautious and a little scared of all the unintended consequence that can happen when things are so in flux. And at the same time, I'm also always looking at the world and thinking, you know what, the world has always been pushing towards some sort of progress. And so hopefully, you know, at the end of the day, systems self-regulate to a point again that feels okay. But I just think at the moment there's so many unintended consequences that we can't

understand. And I think to your point of AI, that we are now at a point where we literally can't understand some of the things, by definition, even the people who are. who programmed the I don't fully understand it. And so it's the kind of thing where I think the unintended consequences might be bigger and more severe. And that is something that, you know, with two daughters now that I'm more and more concerned about where that is going. I think global leaders just need to meet with each other more often to get rid of that wrong presupposition, that wrong presumption. Right.

And that's one way to do it. Another way would be to rope in some potential interlocutor who could actually bridge the communication at the rate that we're witnessing so much more, you know, I call that political neurosis, you know, in many parts of the world. And I think the convening of as many, you know, leaders as possible in one place with the existence of some interlocutor or just the breaking of the ice between the two leaders, I think would help in bringing about more peace and stability. and that I think would entail a higher degree of serendipity. You never know. They might have gone to the same high school together. You know, they might have, you know, played hockey where, you know, and they didn't know that they played hockey in high school.

And whatever, there's always that commonality that strikes in a good way, right, for serendipity purposes. And I found that in conversations. And, you know, I tell people, man, you know, I'll show you to bruises. I've failed many more times than I've succeeded. And people just don't see that. But when you talk to somebody, you break the ice and you get rid of all that wrong presupposition, wrong presumption of each other. And I think that that's a necessary tool. Yeah.

That's the thing, right? Once you look at a country, not as a, this is this and this country. But once you meet a person, you're like, oh, actually, I understand now there's. the humanizing of it, right? And humanizing and understanding. And then seeing those unexpected and expected overlaps. I'm with you there. And I think also with the failure piece, that's, you know, I have a colleague of mine,

she did a failure CV. So she just listed literally all the things that didn't go and showed it to her students. And they were like, wow, like, this is a long CV. It's longer. It's a longer CV. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that's also what needs to be communicated, that we can't take for granted,

that things always work out, that every relationship. ship works out or that every, by definition, a lot of things will fail. And that's also okay, right? And that's kind of, I think, that mindset shift that we talked about earlier to not see failure as an endpoint as this is now who I am. I am defined as this kind of thing that didn't work out. But more as, no, this is now the inflection point. This is a starting point for another door that opens. Like this door is closing. There is another door that opens. And that becomes an inflection point. And the amount of people where something that failed became the inflection point for something great, you know, the quintessential example being,

imagine someone breaks up with you and, you know, you think, oh my God, the world is going, that's the worst thing that can happen. And then six months later, you meet the true love of your life, you'll thank you a person five months ago that you broke up with me, right? And so I think that's a lot of times in life that something that failed at some point might actually make room for something even better. And I think that's the framing piece in terms of Does the situation define me or do I define the situation? Christian, we've spent almost an hour and a half. For somebody out there that doesn't understand the concept of serendipity

and somebody that wants to be more serendipitous, what would be the two to three things that you would encourage him or her to do at the most simple level when you flashed this book? Well, three things for cultivating serendipity, the first one is really to think about what are three or four things that are truly meaningful to me at the moment that I want to throw into different conversations that I'm having soon. So for me, you know, it's meaningful at the moment serendivity. It's meaningful that I have my daughters. And so when I bump into someone in the elevator here at the university and they ask, hey, how are you doing?

I'm like, oh, you know my daughter, this and this. Or, oh, you know, serendivity, this and this. Like, I always, I have something that I can throw in that, especially, helps me as an introvert to just have two or three kind of meaningful things that can throw in because the other person then picks one or two of them and goes into that direction. And so it becomes a more meaningful conversation, but also a lot of, oh my God, such a coincidence moment. So that's the hook strategy. Another one is really about the way of we asking questions. Do we ask questions, what do you do? Put yourself and the other person in the box. Or do you ask what do you enjoy doing

and then really kind of allow the person to say, hey, you know, what I'm doing? What I'm doing? really excited about actually is the metaverse or whatever it is. And you might be like, oh my God, such a coincidence. And then the third is really the deeper undercurrents. Like, what is holding us back from having more serendivity in our lives and how can we work on it? And I think really thinking about situations in life where serendipity could have happened, but it didn't, and then kind of trying to understand the pattern, working on that pattern, but then also at the same time thinking about when did serendivity happen in my life? And how can I do more of this? Oh, Serendivity always tends to happen if I do this and this, great, can I do more of this?

And then a bonus one just came to mind because we talked so much about meaning making is when you are in a conversation thinking about is there one idea, one thing I can contribute to the other person. So when you're speaking, I'm thinking, oh, okay, I can introduce you to my wife who's working on experts that thing. Or, hey, here's a link I can send you from this and this article that might be interesting for your next podcast guest. whatever it is, but just something where

training the brain to see connections, to see overlaps, and then neuroplasticity means the brain more and more shifts towards seeing those dots and connecting more of them. And then, you know, serendipity will happen more and more. For somebody of spirituality, what would you convey to him or her for purposes of optimally combining

spirituality with serendipity as to find that better intersection between call it ambition, call it imagination, call it coincidence, and all the rest for a better life going forward. Well, a lot of serendivity is about that idea of experiencing some sort of flow, some sort of connection, sense of connection, right? So when I think about spirituality, I think about sense of connection. It's about, you know, connecting with something bigger than myself.

You know, I'm not really religious, but I connect with, you know, when I meditate, when I connect with nature, when I connect in different ways. So we all somehow want to connect with something, right? It can be a God. It can be something else. And so I think there's beauty in this idea of allowing ourselves to connect and then taking that kind of groundedness and the connectedness and then sharing that with the world. And so we talked about this in our pre-talk that if you think about a lot of religions around the world, the idea of being kind to others, being generous, you know, the idea of karma, good things come back to. And that is, you know, when you look at serendipity, a lot of the patterns are about

good things will come back to you. If I make three introductions for a person, at some point, I get an introduction from them and it will be wonderful. That's not what I'm doing it, because, you know, I do it. It feels good and it's a wonderful thing to do. But also it's almost camaic that good things tend to then lead to good things. And so I think there's a lot in there where, you know, religions for a very long time have told us, hey, look, if you're good to other people, it's more likely that they're good to you.

And that's what serendipity is a lot of times about. It's about connecting dots with each other and assuming that the other person is a good person. I think, you know, to me at the end of the day, if there's a kind of macro theme that we've been discussing, behind what we've been discussing, serendipity can help us make our own lives better. But serendipity is also the kind of thing that in a world that's so disconnected, that's so, you know, part of the same. and so on, it's a way that helps us again identify the joy between, especially those unexpected connections, you know, seeing the kind of left wing with the right wing person, finding out that they have the same passion for black holes in the metaverse, right? And thinking, oh, my God,

I have more in person with that common than I thought, in common than I thought. And so, you know, as someone who works a lot in tribal contexts, I'm always fascinated by once people use hooks or things like that and identify things they have in common, it becomes much more meaningful. And they become humanized. And you see, wow, we have more in common than others. And so I think that's kind of the spiritual piece around we are all somehow connected, but we have to find that connection. And we need to make it more likely to find that connection with some of those strategies.

Any final messages, Christian, for our audience? You know, full circle is probably with a Viktor Frankl that Victor Frankel, he was in one of the toughest situations you can imagine. He was in a concentration camp. He survived the Holocaust. And he always wondered when he was in a very tough situation, how can I create some meaning? In a situation where there is objectively no meaning, can I create some meaning? And so he did things like, can I speak with other prisoners in the camp?

And by doing this, I have a reason now tomorrow morning to wake up because I still have to speak with people to make them feel better. And by doing this, I feel better. But also he still wanted to write his book. He wanted to get out there. you know, be there in the world. And so he had a big meaning as well. And so he had this kind of duality of meaning in a way. And I found that very useful. You know, when I was in New York, we briefly talked about it. I, you know, had just arrived in New York and COVID happened. Everything got shot down. And we had students from around the world, right? Indonesia, Singapore,

Germany, India, you name it. And from one day to the other, they were all isolated alone in their apartments in a new city and nobody knew when they would ever get out. And it was just a completely depressing situation. And I had students ask me, well, what's the point? Like, why would I continue if we don't even know if the world will still go on the way we want it? And so we try to think about what are ways that we can learn from Viktor Frankl and imbue meaning. And so one of the things I did with a couple of students was to say, can you think about a neighbor, for example, who's elderly, who cannot get on the app to order food and who can't go to the supermarket because they will infect themselves, every morning you will order them food so that they have

order, that they have food on the table. Now you have reason to wake up tomorrow morning. Now there's something meaningful to you. And so I think this idea of creating meaning in whatever situation is extremely powerful. They make connections with their neighbors. They had some wonderful friendships, kind of all this, but also they felt much more meaningful. And so the reason I'm saying this is there's this beautiful clip that I recommend everyone to watch on YouTube where Victor Frankel talks about the flight instructor. And the flight Instructure told Victor, if you want to fly like this, you have to start like this, because the wind will pull you down.

So if you start as a rationalist, you end up as a depressionist, but if you start as an optimist, you end up as the real realist. And that's really what this is about. It's about saying, you know what? The world is hard. Like, believe me, like, you know, our house is burned down. Like, life is really hard. And at the same time, is there still something that we can find meaning in because we've been given this beautiful gift that life is? can we now control whatever we can control, focus on that, and the rest we accept.

I think that's where spirituality comes in also to say I accept the things that I can't change, and then I focus on the things I can change. And so if there's one thing I would love people to take from our conversation is, let's focus on the things that feel meaningful, let's impact them, let's do something with it. And I think either the reason I've been so excited to catch up with you is I feel you've been one of those people, right, who has always pushed meaningful initiatives across different fields. and say, you know what, how can I still do something here? And you've lived different lives, right?

You've now also made that shift towards different lives, politics, business, academia, right? That's kind of those kind of shifts where it's always saying, what can I do next? Is there something I can still do at this point in time with what has been given to me? And I think that is kind of to me the key thing is, yes, there's a lot of tough things in the world. And at the same time, what has been given to me, what can I do with this? What is under the locus of my control? great stuff with that on that note we'll have to end this conversation while i hold this book up christian thank you so much for gracing our show thank you so much friends that was christian bush at

the marshal school of business at usc and the author of serendipity mindset thank you