Speaker B argues that serendipity alone won't build a speaking career. You need clear goals, specific people to target, and a deliberate networking strategy. Drifting through the business landscape gets you occasional contacts, not consistent work.
Now you also talk about the idea of serendipity in relation to the fact that you can't scale it. And I wondered if you could expand on what you mean by that and why this is such a big issue for speakers.
You have these moments of serendipity, whether it's like my TEDx example, or you meet someone in a certain way, or you meet someone who introduces you to someone. There's all these kind of serendipitous moments that you could never have orchestrated or planned. But the inherent problem is with a lot of those is there's just no scalability to them. You can't repeat that. I think what's missing a lot of time is really focused intention and attention in terms of building something that is more scalable. And oftentimes that comes from having very sharp focus in terms of what am I really trying to achieve? Who are those right people that I want to connect with? And it's not just speakers. You look at anybody, vast majority of the business landscape out there, a lot of people, they just float through and they pick up these interesting people along the way, which is fine. But unless you're really deliberate in terms of your relationship building strategy, you can just end up in this place that it's a little wishy-washy and you may not be achieving the results that you want to achieve.
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