Creating a Serendipity Flywheel for Amazing Opportunities in Your Life

Since college, nearly every career and business opportunity in my own life has come about through serendipity. And in this video, I'm gonna tell you how you can maximize serendipity by creating a serendipity flywheel to have good things happen to you, advance your career again and again. Hey, I'm Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing and Community at Vitalize Venture Group. I'm also the host of the Just Go Grind podcast where I interview founders and venture capitalists. And I wanna start off by explaining just what serendipity is. Serendipity is the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or positive way. This is something you can actually work on, you can improve on, you can engineer in your own life if you take an active approach with this. You may have noticed how people are building in public more and more. And if you're on Twitter as much as I am, you see it all the time. Founders or VCs talk about what they're building, things they're investing in. And there's a real science to this. There's a real reason why they do this. It's to engineer serendipity. Even if they aren't actually trying to, this is something that actually happens. And when I was talking to Taylor Nieman, who's the founder of Toucan, She started tweeting once per day and has found customers, investors, people for her team, all through posting on social media, which is one way to create serendipity. You can share milestones, share updates, good times, bad times, struggles, things that are going well, kind of sharing your journey along the way. And by doing this, you create opportunities for people to find you. You create opportunities for you to connect with other people or them to help you. And that comes about through putting yourself out there, through having some type of home on the internet, especially where people can then find you. Your stuff and good things can happen. One of the most serendipitous moments I can remember that's been beneficial for someone was with Ryan Graves. He happened to see a tweet by Travis Kalanick talking about Uber in the very, very early days before they were even a product, I believe. And eventually over time that ended up working out very well for him. He is now a billionaire. He helped grow Uber years ago into what it has become today. Take that for better or worse, but that was a serendipitous moment because he was on social media, because he was following the right people. That's what being on these different platforms gives you the ability to do. And it's about using these platforms to help you and to engineer serendipity by putting yourself out there, by being on the social platforms, by putting yourself in a position to take advantage of the amazing connectedness we now have in the world. And you can engineer the serendipity in a variety of ways I'm going to get into in one second. But first, I think it's just important to understand what this can give you. It can help advance your career, help you find a job. It can help you find a co-founder if you're starting a business, help you find customers for your company if you're starting company. There are so many ways in which you taking an active approach to create this serendipity flywheel is beneficial for your life. I've seen this a number of ways in my own life, one being when I joined Clark Toys. That came about through me creating on the internet, me growing a business and talking about it, sharing along the way. My cousin happened to find that. We ended up chatting over time. Serendipitously, he found what I was doing and ended up joining that company, moving from Milwaukee to Las Vegas because of that, because I was creating on the internet and it gave me the opportunity then to have people see that, to see what I was working on, which then helped me grow my own career, advance to that next step. The second way was when I went to get the MBA. I decided to get an MBA, went to USC, and I wanted to do that on purpose. I knew that that would allow me to create serendipity in my own life by putting myself in a location, in an environment where I'd be surrounded by people where good things could happen just by being there. It's like being native to the internet, being on Twitter or LinkedIn or creating on these different platforms, it gives you an at-bat. I thought getting an MBA was also giving me a chance. It was putting me in the right position to be around startups, to be around people who are doing interesting things, and to allow me then to build this serendipity. Something I talked about a lot with John Esberg in one of the episodes of the Jessica Grind podcast as well, around how we create serendipity by putting ourselves out there on the internet and then allowing people to connect with you, but also jumping at opportunities as you see them because you're on these platforms. The final way I really was able to leverage serendipity and create a flywheel for maximizing the serendipity in my own life was by starting a podcast. And there's no denying the Just Go Grind podcast helped me in a multitude of ways. And I've done nearly 300 episodes at this point, and I've met so many founders, investors, and operators, all because I created a podcast that brought people into me. I have PR people every week approaching me pitching company founders to be on the show. But then also, as I promote that, as people see that I have this home on the internet that is a podcast, now a video show as well on YouTube, and that becomes a vehicle for serendipity where as I create more and more episodes, it's this flywheel effect where I meet more people, get connected to more networks over and over and over again. And then people approach me all the time. And I can see opportunities that come about because then they're in my circle, then I see things that they're doing. It allows for so many good things to happen, one being friendships, of course, another being, you know, business connections, and then, then just advancing your business and your career through partnerships, through all different ways. And it's not like you have to do a ton to give yourself the opportunity to leverage serendipity in your own life. I think there's a few ways you can go about this, and the first thing is choosing the topics, the themes, the things you care about the things that you want to put out into the world. Early on, you may choose a few things. You may do a variety of things to see what sticks, to see what's interesting to you, to see what you can maintain. But once you do that, you start to figure it out. Like, I figured out for me I was interested in startups and entrepreneurship and venture capital, which led me to a venture capital firm over time. For you, maybe some other topics. For you, you may find out that you love bikes. You may find out that you love sports. You love something around whatever interests you could put out into the world that could help you then land a job. For instance, what happens if you create a podcast or a video show around basketball and you're breaking down highlights and you're talking about the games? Do you think that gives you a better chance at someone in the entertainment industry to approach you? I definitely do. And I think that can be something people use for their careers, for their business, again and again. So the first thing is choosing these topics, choosing these themes that you want to put things out into the world. The next thing to do is choose your medium. Do you want to write blog posts? Do you want to film videos like this? Do you want to record podcasts? What is the medium that you feel comfortable with, that you can be consistent with over time to then build this flywheel for serendipity where people can find you? From there, you've chosen your themes, you know what mediums you're going to use. You have to create your home base. So what will be your home base as you move forward? That could be at your personal website. I have justingordon.com, also justgo grind.com. You can use a website to kind of be the home for all of your content. It could be your YouTube channel, you could use that as your home, or that's the one place that you send everyone there. I suggest using a website to start with. Everyone should have this. You can then gather emails, you can then grow an email list that would help you then reach out to people give them a reason to come and approach you. You can also stay in touch with people that way so they don't just fall through the cracks. You then have their contact information where then you can send emails weekly, monthly, whatever it may be, provide value that way. And again, engineer these moments of serendipity. Once you've chosen your topics and themes, the medium in which you want to create, the home base for everything you're doing, then it's just about distribution. So where are you going to distribute all the things you create to create this then flywheel of serendipity. And that could be Twitter. If you're in the startup world, I definitely suggest it. Venture capitalists are always on Twitter. If you are in a more business space in a different capacity, whether it be more corporate, maybe it's LinkedIn. I mean, maybe you're looking at TikTok or YouTube. There's so many different platforms out there, but where are you going to distribute what it is you're doing? And it doesn't have to necessarily be those platforms. It could also be you guest posting. It could be you doing guest podcasts cuz you have a particular expertise. But whatever it is, you have to think about what the distribution is on top of just creating things. Because if you create something on the internet but no one sees it, you're not gonna give yourself an opportunity to have this flywheel of serendipity where good things are happening to you and people are coming to you. So the distribution is definitely important as well as you go about creating these different things. And finally, to maximize your serendipity, you have to be consistent, whether it be creating every week, every day, every month, whatever that cadence is, being consistent, it's gonna really help you continue to put out content, continue to put out things into the world that then give you a chance at serendipity and having other positive opportunities come your way. So being consistent, as everyone knows, it's boring to even say that, but being consistent is everything. You have to be consistent. And the people who do that, the people who are consistent again and again, they reap the rewards and they have the benefits from being consistent. And I think another important thing besides the consistency is around figuring out those topics and themes, as I mentioned, that you're inherently passionate about, but then also that has some potential for what you want to get into next. So if, like I said, if you want to get into basketball or sports, whatever, you're creating around that, great. But if you're not passionate about that in the first place, like, why are you trying to get into it? And how are you going to be able to create over time if you don't care about what you're doing with that? So being passionate about the subject matter, the topics that you're actually creating about, that is just as important as being consistent. And that actually ties into you Being able to be consistent again and again. The final thing being jump on opportunities. You're going to create a lot. You're going to spend a lot of time putting yourself out there. It can be scary, I understand. But by creating on the internet over time and being consistent, it gives you all these opportunities. But if you don't jump on them, it's just a waste. And so on top of everything else, you just have to jump on opportunities. So when I started creating a podcast, eventually I was doing it daily for a number of months. And I did it daily for 113 days in a row. And one of those podcast episodes of me reaching out to Gail Wilkinson from Vitalyze, and I ended up joining them. And that was all because I had started creating things. She had seen that. So when I reached out, it was an easy yes around, yes, I'll be on your show. It looks great. And I jumped on that opportunity where then when there was a role open, said, yeah, I'm going to take that. I'm going to go pursue that. So it's a combination of putting yourself out there, but then jumping on the opportunities that arise. Because of that. And when you do that, you've created a serendipity flywheel where you'll continually have good opportunities come to you. Good things can happen in your career, in your personal life, all because you started to put yourself out there. As you leave here, if you haven't already, just create that first thing, that first video, that first podcast, that first blog post or tweet, whatever it is. Once you start with the first one, then you can snowball everything from there and really see some progress and see some traction. It takes time, I understand, but that's all right. Thank you so much for watching, really appreciate it. I will see you in the next video.