Earning Serendipity (eBook)

4 Skills for Creating and Sustaining Good Fortune in Your Work

Glenn Llopis (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-7338125-9-7 (ISBN)

Infos

For some people, success seems fated or shrouded in mystery. But in Earning Serendipity, Glenn Llopis shows that most positive changes in fortune--in careers or in corporate ventures--are no mystery at all. We all have control over the path to prosperity. Progression along that path is the result of a rare combination of skills that readers can develop and apply in their careers, businesses, and lives. These four skills are Seeing with circular vision: Broaden your observation beyond what you seek and beyond the obvious details before you. Sowing entrepreneurial seeds: When good vision is met with consistent, hand-dirtying execution every day the result is a stable, growing fortune. Growing seeds with the greatest potential: Learn how to recognize the most promising opportunities and give them the right amount of attention. Sharing the harvest: Focus on meeting others' needs to improve personal good fortune. Those who master this quartet tap into a power most never reach: the power to create and sustain a momentum of good fortune. This ability to earn serendipity can elevate a career or company quicker than any single force. And with the skills outlined in this book, readers will be catapulted onto the path of prosperity.

GLLG CEO Glenn Llopis (pronounced YO-p?s) is a Cuban-American executive and entrepreneur that has dedicated his career transforming leaders, teams and organizations to see change & volatility as a growth opportunity. He serves as a senior advisor, and speaker to Fortune 500 companies across multiple industries. He is the bestselling author of the books Earning Serendipity, The Innovation Mentality, Leadership in the Age of Personalization, and Unleashing Individuality. In November 2024, Glenn launched his new book titled, Make Reinvention Your Superpower. He has been a leadership strategy contributor to Forbes since 2010, and also contributes to the Harvard Business Review and Entrepreneur magazine. Glenn was recognized as a top 100 leadership speaker and business thinker by Inc. magazine. He is a faculty member at the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). After a successful career as a corporate executive with notable entrepreneurial ventures, Glenn launched GLLG in 2007 to develop high performance leaders, teams, and cultures focused on inclusion and the power of individuality. He is the founder of the Leadership in the Age of Personalization (LAOP) movement, which has inspired a grassroots effort among cross-industry executives focused on shredding the limitations of standardization to thrive in our age of personalization. Since 2019, GLLG has produced, hosted and designed the content strategy for seven LAOP thought leadership summits and for more than 100 episodes of the Personalization Outbreak podcast, all featuring executives from corporate, healthcare and higher education. Glenn has prepared more than 450 speakers, moderated over 100 panel discussions, interviewed more than 100 guests for the podcast, and led an executive consortium of 112 people to deeply examine the strategic insights and trends related to personalization in the workplace and in the marketplace. He is known for his unique and dynamic ability to facilitate and mediate roundtables and conduct executive coaching to propel next-level thinking for senior executives, leaders, and managers globally.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 0

Creating and Sustaining

Good Fortune in Your Work

“Only learn to seize good fortune, for good fortune is always here.”

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

I make only one promise: your life will not be the same. What I offer is more than advice, more than hope. I offer you a mirror. In it you will see you are more powerful than you know. I offer you a map. With it you will discover you are closer than you know to a career of good fortune.

You’ve heard it said that chance governs us all, but I tell you that fortune is not arbitrary. There are the lucky: the lottery winners filing for bankruptcy, the gamblers betting away their winnings, the trust fund babies trapped in apathy. They know nothing of good fortune. Their lives are grains of sand slave to the ebbing and flowing tide, sand castles for only an hour.

Then there are the flourishing: those who outlive, outwork, and out love—to whom good things always seem to come. They inhabit a foundation from which positive happenstance seems to grow in abundance. Yet their good fortune springs not from mere chance but from the rare abilities to see what the majority miss and to exploit what most think uncontrollable. They are not lucky, and their fortune is no accident.

It is said that misfortune chases us all, but I tell you that fortune pursues you more swiftly. It reaches for you. You must learn only to seize it where it dwells—in the obvious and obscure places all around you—and to sow its seeds wherever you go. I will give you the eyes to see good fortune and the tools to keep it on your side from this day forward.

ALL YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN

There is more happening around you than you might realize. It is said that you find what you are looking for, but I tell you that if you learn to look around and beyond what you seek, you will discover things more valuable, timely, and true. Perhaps I am being too mystical. Or perhaps I am confirming something you’ve sensed all along.

I am speaking of serendipity—what some call “positive happenstance.” Most believe it comes capriciously, without hint of how, when, or why. The jobless woman takes lunch alone in Central Park on a cool autumn day. As she picks at her bland leftovers, a businesswoman approaches to ask for directions, and in an instant, a connection is made and her dream job is found.

We like to say she was lucky … or that the universe had mercy on her … or that it was a matter of finally being in the right place at the right time.

But what if it was more than a chance occurrence? What if I told you she’d been undervalued by her former employer for years … and that she’d finally left the company and moved to Manhattan to forge a new path … and that she’d always loved autumn in New York and especially in Central Park? Perhaps such observations would expand your notion about what happened and whether she had some control over her good fortune.

With a rare combination of four skills, you will begin to see and seize the momentous opportunities around you before they have passed you by. Opportunities of which you were not previously aware—often, the only opportunities that will enlarge your career path and increase your propensity for success and fulfillment every day. Most are blind to these opportunities, and this is the primary reason so many workers are uninspired, merely putting in time to meet unremarkable goals.

It has been said that self-knowledge is the mother of success, but success is first born of something else. Self-knowledge is the offspring of experience—we learn of ourselves through that which our senses take in—and experience is the offspring of the opportunities we have pursued.

Opportunity is the true mother of success.

Opportunity is the primary catalyst for sustaining good fortune in your career or company. And it builds momentum quicker than any other success factor.

One right opportunity skillfully pursued births a host of additional opportunities that would otherwise have never existed. A middle manager steps off the corporate track to launch an online venture with a close friend. With a little money and a lot of heart, the two succeed in putting their business on the map in the first year. The business multiplies exponentially the following year and is featured in two major publications—one a cover story. In the third year, this once-small venture garners a large offer from a Web-based giant. The acquisition not only opens the doors to a host of new business ventures, it also initiates requests for both partners to consult large organizations on how to differentiate Web presence and small organizations on how to establish Web presence. The former middle manager also receives a sizable advance for a forthcoming book.

Three years earlier, there was a middle manager with a predictable paycheck and an inside track to a corner office in ten years. Perhaps not a bad career path, but certainly not what it could be. With one opportunity seen and seized rightly, the individual enlarged the field before him and changed his fortune forever. With the subsequent opportunities that bloomed, he then created a momentum of good fortune that was his to preserve. The same is available to you. You must only learn to see and grow opportunities rightly.

The significance and impact of your work has more to do with the momentum of opportunities you pursue than anything else. The quantity of opportunities is a smaller matter. The quality of opportunities is everything. This explains why a green twentysomething can birth Facebook while fortysomethings everywhere struggle to make ends meet—or why more people became millionaires during the Great Depression than during any other era of American history, including the dot-com boom.

Opportunities are always present, and rightly pursuing one

can forever change the landscape of one’s fortune.

The opportunities you see and grow determine the fortune of your career or corporate venture. Self-knowledge can give you insight. Experience can give you confidence. But the two are tamed without the right opportunities. One right opportunity pursued can elevate the potential of any career and any organization.

THE SCIENCE OF GOOD FORTUNE

We speak of things like “overnight success” and “a stroke of luck” as though they are shrouded in mystery. I will show you that most changes in fortune—those outside of betting luck—are no mystery at all. They are the result of a rare combination of four skills employed on a regular basis. Not every fortunate person is aware she is employing these activities, which explains why most experience good fortune only rarely and randomly. But those who learn to employ the quartet on a regular basis discover a reservoir of power greater than self-knowledge, greater than intuition, and greater than experience. And they thus tap into a reservoir of potential most never reach. The ability to earn serendipity will elevate a career or company quicker than any single force. If sustained well, it yields a tradition of success.

At times we witness one who seems to be in the midst of a lucky streak. But what appears to be one opportunity, one windfall, one great experience after another is actually the natural by-product of certain skills applied on a continual basis.

You see, serendipity is not governed by chance alone. I must concede there is an art to good fortune—certain occurrences cannot be fully explained or controlled. A middle-aged couple strolls through a Vegas casino on their way to meet friends for dinner. On a whim, the husband slides one quarter into a slot machine and hits a six-figure jackpot. We speak of his “good fortune,” but such inexplicable occurrences are better deemed “luck.” While they occur every day all over the world, they can be neither controlled nor explained. At best, we can appreciate them. But to lean on such lucky breaks—to lean on the art of good fortune—is no strategy at all. It is merely far-fetched hope. The odds of success are never in your favor.

However, there is also a science to good fortune. It can be earned, not by will, force, or manipulation, but by the application of four skills to your workdays. This rare blend of skills taps into an immense power that few ever take the time to understand, let alone master. Yet those that do hold sway not only in the workplace but also in society at large. I call the four skills the Four Leaves, and together they represent an uncommon crop—a propensity for good fortune that, when well managed, yields a tradition of success with opportunities perpetually budding. These Four Leaves are

1. Broadened Observation: The practice of seeing with circular vision

2. Extensive Innovation: The practice of sowing entrepreneurial seeds

3. Strategic Focus: The practice of growing seeds of greatest potential

4. Generous Purpose: The practice of sharing the harvest

I call the one who makes regular use of the Four Leaves a serendipiter: a socially conscious individual, or organization, who inspires innovation and initiative and thus propels good fortune for himself and his community. Applied daily, the Four Leaves expand the field of opportunities before you and all serendipiters, increasing your leverage, your influence, and your propensity for success. The...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.1.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• ISBN-10: 1-7338125-9-8 / 1733812598
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7338125-9-7 / 9781733812597