Identifying and taking hold of a lucky break

When Andrew Conru founded a dating website called FriendFinder, he soon became frustrated by users uploading explicit videos. Conru spent many hours deleting clips of home pornography before realizing he had stumbled by chance on a profitable niche. He renamed the site Adult FriendFinder and later sold it for a reported $500 million.

The role of simple luck in success is a fashionable topic. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, concluded recently that there was little to learn from profiles of companies and chief executives, because their triumphs were more a case of serendipity than good judgment.

Not so, says Frans Johansson in his new book, “The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World,” published by Portfolio.

“Acknowledging the power of random forces does not render us powerless. Quite the contrary,” he argues. His entertaining tract is called “The Click Moment” — when something falls into place and inspiration strikes — but “A fluke’s guide to glory” would have been equally accurate.

It starts off by recognizing that not everyone needs luck: Athletes — such as tennis star Serena Williams — can advance through practice, he says.

“She is playing the same game over and over again. But the rest of us are playing in a world that is constantly changing and adapting through market forces.”

He then rattles off examples of business serendipity. Windows 3.0 and 3.1, operating systems that eventually sold 10 million copies, would never have been released if Steve Ballmer had succeeded in shutting down the team behind them.

Hedge fund manager John Paulson might not have bet against subprime mortgages had an employee not left to study for an MBA, leading his firm to hire an unemployed banker with an eye for numbers.

Johansson even admits to his own lucky break. His first book, “The Medici Effect,” made waves only when his wife was able to put it in front of some influential executives.

So, how can we engineer our own flukes?

Rule one: Don’t try too hard. Citing research from Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor who has studied the key characteristics of people who are unusually lucky, Johansson argues that focusing too narrowly on your goals risks failing to note other opportunities. Adult FriendFinder would never have been conceived if Conru had been better at deleting pornography.

Johansson also advocates finding ways to make contact with new ideas, and cites an executive who attends conferences outside her field for just that reason.

Next, Johansson recommends making lots of small “purposeful bets”: trying out ideas and taking the smallest steps possible to test their potential.

Even so, “complex forces” — the rest of the world — may have a decisive effect on our success. So if opportunities do arrive in an unexpected form, we must do what Conru did with his site’s pornographic patrons and capitalize on them.

“We may even see the idea taking off all on its own, spreading and building in surprising ways. This is the moment to double down,” Johansson says.

“The Click Moment” is an informed and measured account. But ultimately it is in vain that we believe we could all be good at identifying winning ideas when we see them: Johansson himself cites how poor humans are at predicting what will succeed.

The suggestion that we can always exploit serendipity is equally wishful. It is reminiscent of the scene in the film “Titanic,” in which one wealthy passenger proclaims: “A real man makes his own luck.” His statement was rebutted by an iceberg. Sometimes the force of chance is so inescapable that the most we can do is arrange the deck chairs.

The solution? After explaining how dropping out of college led him to understand the fonts that served Apple so well, Steve Jobs put it nicely enough: “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” He got lucky, and we may too. Fingers crossed.

Henry Mance is a contributor to the Financial Times of London, in which this review first appeared.