"Being observant, open-minded, friendly, and optimistic invites luck your way. Take this simple story: several years ago I was at a small local grocery store frequented mostly by those who live nearby. A man and his young daughter approached me in the frozen-food aisle and politely asked how to prepare frozen, canned lemonade. The man had an accent I couldn’t identify, and I was pretty sure he must be new to the area. I told him how to prepare the lemonade and asked where he was from. He said Santiago, Chile. I asked his name and what brought him to our town. I had no ulterior motive. I was just curious. He told me his name was Eduardo and that he and his family were in the area for a year so he could learn about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. He was in line to run his family’s business and was in search of tools to make it more innovative. I told him about the entrepreneurship program at Stanford’s School of Engineering and said I’d be happy to do what I could to be of help. Over the next few months I introduced Eduardo to various people in the entrepreneurship community, and he expressed his thanks for my assistance.
Fast-forward two years. I was heading for a conference in Santiago and sent Eduardo a message asking if he wanted to get together for coffee. At the last minute, he wasn’t able to make it, but invited me to go to a specific location in downtown Santiago with a few of my colleagues. We showed up at the office building and were led to the roof, where we were picked up by Eduardo’s family’s private helicopter for a simply spectacular ride above the city, up to the surrounding mountains, and over his family’s ski resort. It was incredible! And to think that it resulted from helping him figure out how to make lemonade. Of course, I didn’t help Eduardo because I wanted a helicopter ride. But by putting myself out there, being open to helping someone, and following up years later, I became quite “lucky.” Earlier I discuss the art of turning lemons (problems) into lemonade (opportunities). But luck goes beyond this—it’s about turning lemonade (good things) into helicopters (amazing things!)."
This made me think about my own life, and to my surprise a lot of important things like my first job, internship in Paris were in fact a result of randomly bumping into someone and keeping contact with them without any expectations which later brought opportunities.
In contrast, a lot of times I have cold emailed people who I didn't know asking for help. Friends say that I am good at it. Most of the times I got what I was looking for with these cold emails. These conversations (lets call them CCs for cold conversations) were different from the lemonade conversations (LCs) in the following ways:
1. CCs are primarily about asking, LCs are about giving. CCs involve knowing who am I, what I seek; LCs are about finding what the other person's story is, how can I help them.
2. CCs are more focussed and limited in scope, in the sense that you can only ask what you know about. LCs, on the other hand, can expose you to ideas about which you had never thought about or things you didn't know exist.
3. CCs are low variance and more efficient - you either get what you asked for or you don't. LCs are more inefficient as most of them won't fetch you anything. But they have high variance too, so some of them could get you a lot more. This quora post by James Altchur is all about it.
3. CCs are low variance and more efficient - you either get what you asked for or you don't. LCs are more inefficient as most of them won't fetch you anything. But they have high variance too, so some of them could get you a lot more. This quora post by James Altchur is all about it.
I find LCs a key characteristic of successful people. LCs are powerful because:
1. They happen more frequently, even when you are not looking for them.
2. They can get you even what you are not looking for.
This idea is also strongly advocated in Reid Hoffman's book The startup of you (a must read book for everyone). They suggests that the best way of networking is to help others, sometimes even unasked. The network thus created are the strongest and can really change things for you.
Going forward, I will try to have more LCs!
