Get Lucky:How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business

As the pace of change accelerates and the volume of information explodes around us, we are under incredible pressure to connect just in time with the people and ideas we need to thrive.  In this environment, it’s impossible to plan our way to success.  No matter how smart we are, there will always be factors beyond our sight and outside our control. 

And yet, surprisingly, it’s this very uncertainty that lies behind one of today’s key drivers of success:  luck.

It turns out that luck doesn’t just happen by chance.  Rather, the best kind of luck – those unexpected discoveries known as serendipity – is the luck that we attract to ourselves.  Even if we can’t predict when serendipity will strike, we can court it and prepare for it when it shows up.  And when it does, thanks to our summary of Get Lucky:  How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business, by Thor Muller and Lane Becker, you will know what to do. 

Muller is the co-founder and former chief technology officer of Get Satisfaction, a groundbreaking on-line customer community platform used by more than 65,000 companies.  Becker co-founded Get Satisfaction as well as Adaptive Path, the world’s first user experience design firm.

This summary builds on the research of scientists and the behaviors of some of the smartest entrepreneurs to demystify “planned serendipity” – the ability to harness unexpected discoveries – and distills it into eight skills you can hone to make serendipity work for you.