Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.

And we can think of no better guests to have during these very trying times than our guest today, Dr. Christian

Bush. He spent a decade exploring how we can use uncertainty as a pathway to more joyful,

purposeful, and successful lives. Dr. Bush is the director of the Global Economy Program at New York

University's Center for Global Affairs, where he teaches on purpose-driven leadership,

impact entrepreneurship, social innovation, and emerging markets. He's the author of the new book,

The Serendipity Mindset, The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck. Dr. Bush, thank you so much for

joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I think a lot of us view good luck. Dr. Bush, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

I think a lot of us view good luck as simply chance. You say there's an art and science to

creating good luck. Yeah, I mean, one thing I found fascinating in my work as community builder,

entrepreneur and in the last year's also as a researcher is that you know I've come

frequently across those people who just seemed a little bit luckier than others and

you know these would be kind of CEOs or social entrepreneurs or teachers or just

people where when you talk with friends about them they would be like oh yeah no

he had this X Y Z happen and I didn't know how he did it but or she did it but

actually just happened and so I got really curious about how do these people do that? What are the underlying patterns that somehow make them a little bit luckier than others? And so it's really about this idea that there are a lot of things in life we cannot influence, right? I mean, if we're born into a family that is very loving, I mean, that is blind luck.

We can't really influence that, unless there's ways now, but I wouldn't know about it.

But the smart luck, that's really about saying those people see something in the unexpected,

and then they turn it into positive outcomes. And so if you take,

you know, an example in organizations, there's this Chinese company that's got a lot of calls

from farmers and they saw and they said, oh, you know, farmers are complaining that their washing machine.

They're using it, but it always seems to break down. And, you know, what would we usually tell them? We would probably say, well, don't wash your potatoes in the washing machine because they seem to wash their potatoes in there. Or we would just ignore their complaints, right? What they did was they said, okay, this is unexpected. But you know what? Maybe, I mean, we know there's a lot of farmers in China. So if we built in a dirt filter, maybe we just make it a potato washing machine. And so now they have a potato washing machine that is out there. It seemed like, oh, it was just kind of something that randomly happened and, you know, it was just lucky that they had this interesting product come up now

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