The lucky few
Here’s a (not so) fun fact: roughly two-thirds of traditionally published books sell fewer than 1,000 copies in their first year (see the comment here for a breakdown). In other words, many of your favorite writers struggle to earn back their advance, let alone make a living wage. Here’s a good quote from this Vox article on the recent court case regarding a merger attempt between two major publishing houses:
“Everything is random in publishing,” Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle told the court during his testimony. “Success is random. Bestsellers are random."
I don’t have numbers, but I’ll venture a guess and say that something similar applies to blogs, newsletters, podcasts, youtube channels, and so on. For every success, there are thousands struggling beneath the surface, unseen and unheard.
Maybe that’s simply because those lucky few are more talented. Nope, not true. The clue is in the ‘lucky’. This great blog in Scientific American explains how different strands of research converge on the simple observation that luck is the single most significant factor in determining someone’s success; more than talent or hard work. Of course, talent and hard work matter, but they mostly do so by increasing the odds of getting lucky. Some studies even suggest that:
…almost never [do] the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by averagely talented but sensibly luckier individuals.
The blog in Scientific American even reconsiders ‘talent’ as the ability to recognize and make use of lucky opportunities. There’s another, fancier term for these lucky opportunities: serendipity. Or, the art of discovering new things by observing and learning from unexpected information.
Success equals (making use of) serendipity. Hard work and talent can increase exposure to serendipity, without being necessary or sufficient. And let’s not forget privilege. Being rich, knowing a lot of rich people, and not being affected by discrimination all allow someone to invest more time and resources in whatever they want to be successful in.
Yet, much to the glee of all the trickster gods, lady luck still pulls the strings.
Digitize it
There’s a reason I mentioned the specific examples of blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and youtube channels. Not only because they can be current routes to (the traditional notion of) success, but they also live big chunks of their lifecycles online. This has two effects on serendipity:
The world at your fingertips: you can reach people all over the globe. No need to physically mail your writing or other work to people. Select your means of digital distribution, click send or upload, and there you go.
The world got a lot bigger: the people you try to reach also have the world at their fingertips. We are drowning in the creative output of hundreds of thousands of hopeful creators. Good luck getting noticed.
On the face of it, you might think that even this bigger virtual world is also good for serendipity overall. After all, while it might be harder for individual creators to be successful, the system as a whole has a lot more stuff to work with. More stuff implies more chance for coincidence.
Not quite. That big online world also comes with serendipity busters. We call them filter bubbles or echo chambers. Our attention is limited, while the stream of tweets, TikToks, blogs, newsletters, and YouTube videos we are exposed to seems endless. We’re only human, so our subconscious biases will kick in to help us make sense of all this. Confirmation bias and homophily ensure that we subconsciously seek more of the same. Algorithmic personalization does the same. We are coddled by streams of information that never veer too much from our expectations.
Serendipitous design
Can we bust the busters, though? Can we design or customize our virtual world to encourage serendipity? I think we can. There are a few papers on how we might even use serendipity as a guiding design principle for our ever more invasive virtual world(s). If we twist that a little bit, we might be able to use the design of our information channels to encourage serendipity.
The ideas that thread through these ideas are not revolutionary by themselves, but the combination might just get you a nod from lady luck.
Visualization and discovery dashboards. Where is your information coming from? How many sources do you consult? Are these sources reliable? And so on.
For creators? Analytics. Who’s your audience? How did they find you? Look at your inspirations. Who do they interact with? Which channels do they use?
Filters. This might sound counterintuitive. Aren’t filter bubbles the problem? Yes, but - as with most problems - understanding the issue is part of the solution. If you’re aware of your bubble, you can toggle the filters you use to see how the information you’re exposed to changes - it gives you interactive control.
For creators? Find a good bubble, but also try different things. The good bubble will give you your 1,000 ‘true fans’, while the occasional sidequest can put you on other people’s radar.
An architecture for diversity. This is more the responsibility of the people who are building systems that distribute information (which, these days are mostly social media recommender algorithms). There are several ways to tweak these recommender algorithms to provide a more diverse news exposure. As a consumer, you can demand transparency about the algorithm and choose your preferred platform accordingly. Sadly, that’s easier said than done. Multinational monopolies and transparency aren’t the best of friends…
For creators? To the extent possible, figure out how the recommendation algorithm works. Do tags matter? Emojis? Likes? Comments? Be careful, though, because this way might lead you to become a mindless clickbait generator. There’s nothing wrong with bait, of course, but it shouldn’t leave the biter hungry afterward.
Above all, real or virtual, the keys to serendipity are having and keeping an open mind, as well as having the courage to act on an opportunity when it presents itself. I like to think I’m pretty decent at that first one. The second is definitely a work in progress...
Tell me, has an unexpected encounter ever shifted your life onto a different track? A right place, right time moment you could never have imagined?
I think Steve Jobs nailed it when he said we can only connect the dots looking back. In my own life there have been many decisions that seemed minor at the time, but turned out to have profoundly good outcomes down the road. I've also made some incredibly stupid blunders, so I think I've had more good luck than most, maybe even more than I deserve if luck were measured by need.
Maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the belief that "nothing is wasted" has helped me.
I started in academia and then pivoted to health coaching. First 3 years of health coaching was a complete failure, as I tried to leave my old life behind.
Turning to the idea that my years in academia can meld with my health coaching has helped me find a more unique voice, build on the relationships that I had there, and lead to more serendipity in my work now