Incorporate These 5 Habits to Take Advantage of the 'Highly Improbable' Adding a little chaos into your life may just present new opportunities.
By Clément Delangue Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Some people think they can, and should, plan their life. But let's face it, luck has a lot to do with most of the people we meet, most of the goals we achieve and most of the life that we live.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb goes even further by stating that the "highly Improbable," so-called "Black Swan events," run most of our world. Here are five daily habits you can incorporate into your life to encounter more of these events:
1. Walk the crowded streets. Most of the highly improbable events of your life happen because of people. You never know where you'll stumble upon the person of your dreams, your next mentor or a future employer or employee.
So avoid the empty street that will make you miss a potential opportunity.
2. Spend an hour every day to try things that "can't" work. Nobody knows what can or cannot work. Even worse, because most people think that something won't work, they don't try it. Take time for the things that "can't work just because." Prove "because" wrong. This is how startups -- the places where "this is a very, very bad idea," can lead to true innovation -- become the greatest companies in the world.
Related: Habits of the World's Wealthiest People (Infographic)
Freeing yourself from the constraint of making it work will not only allow you to relax and to become more creative in your thinking, but may also end up being your greatest success.
3. Change your routine every day. Doing things differently will allow you to challenge your own status quo to get a new perspective on your daily life. It will prevent you from merely guessing what changes can be made by forcing you to actually experiment, leading to unexpected discoveries.
4. Share things on social networks with no particular goal. With social networks, you can now share what's important to you in an instant. So let people know what you're doing and what you're thinking, because who knows what can happen? The cost of sharing -- reducing your privacy or going out on a limb with a new idea -- are far outweighed by the potential creation of opportunities.
5. Act improbably once a day. Today, I should have worked, I should have partied, I should have had dinner. I wrote this article instead. I hope it can be useful. But it was highly improbable that any major publication would ever publish it … right?
