Much of our success comes from serendipitous encounters — we have the right conversation with the right person at the right time and a new opportunity is born. So to increase our odds of success, we want to have as many of these encounters as possible. But how can we do this in practice?

One simple technique — as recommended by Christian Busch, who wrote a book on the topic — is to think carefully about how you introduce yourself.

If you only tell people what you do or who you work for there isn’t much potential to discover overlapping interests. Instead, to enlarge your luck surface area you should consider mentioning a nugget or two about your passions, interests or hobbies as well. This creates far more potential to discover common ground, which in turn leads to more interesting conversations, meaningful relationships, and future opportunities for everyone concerned.

I’ve seen this happen a lot — especially on Linkedin — where mentioning my interests in photography, classical music, whiskey, running, watches, motorcycle building, etc. has led to some wonderful dialogues and friendships, some of which just happen to have resulted in discussions about working together.

The question is, what are you interested in outside of work? Who knows what we might have in common!

See this post on LinkedIn