Hacking away at serendipity
“But I don’t have time..” — you think to yourself! Days are super busy, non-stop meetings with half of them being useless, hundreds of…
Hacking away at serendipity
“But I don’t have time..” — you think to yourself! Days are super busy, non-stop meetings with half of them being useless, hundreds of emails with most of them having nothing to do with you or your team’s focus, and then there are precious moments that you want to spend time with your family? Sounds familiar ?
So how do you make time for new ideas, new people, new experiences ? How do you make time for serendipity?
Last year in April, I wrote some thoughts on value of connections on LinkedIN and since then I have been hacking away at serendipity.
In case you did not click on the above here is the summary: I added a simple line when I accepted a LinkedIN connection:
Hi so&so! Thanks for connecting. How can I be of any help”?
While I have still not quantified the actual number of responses (probably never will) since then, the ratio of responders certainly increased.
But how can I improve the rate??? I have now added an additional line to the above:
“Hi so&so! Thanks for connecting. How can I be of any help or what can I learn from YOU!”
— it has been amazing to see a response rate jumping significantly — people DO love to share their experiences!
Well given we all have limited time, and some of us have FOMO, I decided to add yet an additional step to the process, making the barrier to entry for the other person even higher.
I am now allocating every Friday for “Serendipity Friday” — it’s an hour and a half of 15 min slots that I ask for the other person to initiate and come prepared with a short paragraph of the intent is : it can be either I can help or they can teach!
Hacking serendipity is not easy given our busy days and nights but learning is a continuous process…. Let’s see what comes out of this next serendipity hack..
Always be curious