Serendipity, Success and Surprise: Reflections on a Curious Year.

‘May you live in interesting times’. Chinese Proverb.

‘Interesting’ was definitely a word I’d use to describe 2022. Fascinating at points, filled with uncertainty, challenge, opportunity and lots of surprises. A year of continued curiosity and flow but more than anything a year of conscious change. Here are a few reflections and musings for the year ahead.

1. Redefining Success?

What is success? For me this was a question I’d never really stopped to think about in depth until recently. Is it about achievement, material success, climbing ladders and ticking societal boxes? Or is it about something much more profound and in many ways harder to achieve? Happiness? Contribution? A sense of living life well? By happiness I’m not thinking about those fleeting moments of pleasure, but a balance of both subjective and eudaimonic wellbeing (frequently feeling good and living a meaningful life).

Redefining success changed the game for me in 2022. I was much more aware of how meaningful the work I was doing was (or if I could somehow make it more meaningful) and if I wasn’t enjoying it I became more aware of how to shift that. Work became less about ‘achievement’ and more about enjoying the process and exploring how best to make a positive contribution. Sure, an ‘achievement mindset’ is useful to an extent. We need it to make things happen. But when we overuse it or focus exclusively on achievement it can lead to a pretty stressful life and we often miss out on so much of the bigger picture.

There’s a concept in yogic philosophy that I really love in relation to this. Ishvara Pranidhana, which I’d translate in a work sense to mean surrendering the fruits of your actions, being wholeheartedly committed to the work you’re doing but not being attached to the results. Do your best and don’t worry about the end goal (it’s out of your control anyway). In this way I’ve found it possible to release the grip of the achieving mindset and to allow a softer, kinder and ultimately more enjoyable path to emerge. For me the ‘how’ really is as important as the ‘what’. If I’ve ‘achieved’ a goal but hated every second of it and we all feel exhausted and burnt-out in the process, is that really success? Whereas if I’ve wholeheartedly committed to the tasks at hand and contributed in the best way I can, then it feels much more like success to me.

Many organisations have also been redefining their views of success in recent years and there’s an increasing realisation that how we’ve been collectively measuring success is deeply floored. As nations we measure GDP and as organisations we classify success based on stock market performance and shareholder value, but are we really measuring success here? What about the wellbeing of our people and the planet, equality, peace or justice? Have we really been measuring the things that we treasure most?

It does feel as though we’re collectively starting to wake up to a new definition of success with many societal measures like the happy planet index, gross national happiness and the OECD happiness index gaining traction. And from an organisational level the rise of the B-corp continues, where businesses commit to changing their structure to focus on people and the planet as well as profit. I recently read Paul Polman and Andrew Winston’s ‘Net Positive’ book in which they share a new manifesto for the corporate world with businesses challenged to assess whether the world is better off with their company in it. They argue that both practically and morally, corporate leaders can no longer sit on the side-lines and must play an active role in addressing our biggest shared challenges. For me this works on an individual level as well as an organisational level. How can I personally act more like a b-corp, serving a wider range of stakeholders and the planet whilst also enjoying the process?

2. The Me + We Economy: Who or what are we creating success for?

One of the defining features of the b-corp and other similar emerging business models is the idea that we’re broadening our view of who it is we serve. There’s no longer the me vs. the rest of the world mentality, but much more of a recognition of an interconnected ecosystem that we all share and serve together. Could this work too on a personal level? Is success really about meeting personal needs or it’s possible to widen our perspectives and commit to taking more responsibility for a broader range of stakeholders including our planet? This could be within our teams or organisations, the groups we’d like to support or even humanity and our planet as whole. Research conducted by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and summarised in their book ‘The Spirit Level’ shows how the countries that prosper most in the broadest sense are not those that are the wealthiest but in fact those that have the highest levels of equality. When more people feel good, we all benefit!

How wide we broaden our nets and the specific groups we serve is likely to be very much an individual exercise. One simple action a coach encouraged me to take last year was to ask ‘how can I best serve the world around me today’ . For me this often led to many surprising, useful and unexpected actions.

3. Conscious creation and curiosity: allowing space for serendipity.

What’s the best way to set goals to balance achievement whilst allowing space for curiosity and serendipity? For many years goal-setting was my thing! Listing things to achieve, setting targets, making things happen. Whether I achieved those goals or not, it gave me some sense of (false) control. But control is such an interesting thing isn’t it. The more we try and control things, the easier it is to slip into auto-pilot, rigidity and a narrow view of the world. Sure we may achieve things but are we really living fully, leaning into the flow of life and allowing space for alternative opportunities and choices to emerge?

I often joke about when I went through ‘the robot years’; a period of time when I lived to such a fixed schedule of tasks that there was literally no space for anything else to emerge. How many possibilities and opportunities for serendipity did I miss out on as a result? And what an incredibly tiring and for me, somewhat dull way to live. There was no space for following curiosities, unexpected adventures or serendipitous encounters. Sure I ‘achieved’ stuff but again was that really success? Thankfully the robot years have now turned into ‘the octopus years’ where I’m increasingly fascinated by the world around me, actively pursue curiosities and always leave space for serendipity and possibility. Softening my grip on ‘goals’ and ‘achievement’ has led to an infinitely more fascinating, adventurous and enjoyable way of life.

Having recently researched flow state and attention for a project with the University of East London, I’m captivated by some of the research conducted to date. It’s suggested that attention can be separated into two components; involuntary attention, where attention is captured ‘bottom up’ and voluntary or directed attention, where attention is directed ‘top down’ by cognitive control processes. For me ‘the robot years’ were all about ‘directed attention’, staying focused, keeping a narrow view and shutting out distractions. Super useful but also super exhausting as relies heavily upon the energy guzzling pre-frontal cortex. The ‘octopus years’ however, have been much more about involuntary attention, spending time in nature, following curiosities, having no plan to attend to for set periods of time. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) is based on the theory of evoking the involuntary attention network by interacting with environments rich with interesting stimulus (fauna, flora, sunsets) as a way of replenishing attention. From my robot and octopus years it seems that integrating these two attention networks really is key for healthy functioning.

Even better than balancing the attention networks would be to spend more time in flow-state. Flow state is an experience of complete absorption in the present activity, which can lead to performances feeling effortless and enjoyable. Research into flow originated from Mihály Csikszentmihályi who through years of research on optimal performance found that one key factor influencing success was an individual’s ability to enter the state of flow frequently and deliberately .

When applied to work, flow is defined as a short-term peak experience that is characterised by absorption, work enjoyment and intrinsic work motivation. Whilst in flow employees are fascinated by the tasks they perform and intrinsically motivated. It’s thought that to access the state of flow, tasks generally need to satisfy 3 proximal conditions: clear goals, immediate feedback and a balance of challenge and skills and there are a number of activities which lend themselves well to Flow state; yoga, surfing, pottery and computer gaming to name a few. But what about work; how can we best access flow state at work?

I’ve been a big fan of the deep work platform; Flown.com in 2022, which is designed to help create the optimal conditions for flow state. Setting clear intentions, running stints of focused work and then the social pressure of us all being in the zoom room together have definitely helped maintain focus. But it’s not quite the same experience as the state accessed through yoga or surfing, being at one with the activity and losing any sense of time. Perhaps this is something to master in 2023: how to work effortlessly and wholeheartedly on meaningful projects, whilst not being attached to the results. Well I love an experiment so let’s see how it goes :-)

Wishing you wonderfully curious, happy and healthy 2023.