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Transcript
Twyla Tharp talks about scratching. Frans Johansson talks about click moments. Steve Johnson talks about following hunches. And actually they’re all pretty similar. And what they really mean is that what you need to do, in business, and I think in life in general, is rather than set a path, a strategy, a plan, and completely and always stick to it, you need to be open to randomness.
And the key thing is that so much success comes from all sorts of random sources. But how do you actually make sure that you are open to that randomness? And the first thing is, is you need to be curious. You need to put yourself in different situations than you would never ever do before; you need to attend different conferences that have got nothing to do with your area of work. You need to read magazines; you need to read books that have got nothing to do with your area of expertise. Because that’s when you suddenly see connections between something that you’re working on and a completely different genre.
You need to have diverse teams; you need to bring in people who, again, think differently to you, who can challenge. It might make you feel awkward, but actually that’s when you get those click moments, when those hunches actually turn into something concrete.
And what I would say is, that if you can collect all of these, these scratches, all of these click moments, all of these hunches, you don’t need to spend a huge amount of money to pursue them. What you just need to do is place very, very small bets on as many as you can just to see which ones actually get to the finish posts and which actually fall halfway around the track.
So we’re at the end of this year, we’ve got a new year starting. What I’d say to you is, put yourself in the position where you can be open to randomness and the opportunities that come from them.