Is Luck Random — or Can You Cultivate It? | Christian Busch | TED

Name: Is Luck Random — or Can You Cultivate It? | Christian Busch | TED
Duration: 12 min 49 s
Description: When the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires destroyed his home and neighborhood, scientist Christian Busch encountered the opposite of serendipity: "zemblanity," or bad

TED12:49Added Aug 30, 2026

When the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires destroyed his home and neighborhood, scientist Christian Busch encountered the opposite of serendipity: "zemblanity," or bad luck by design. Drawing on more than a decade of scientific research, he explores how people can navigate unpredictability by adopting a serendipity mindset that transforms setbacks into unexpected new beginnings. He asks: What if good luck isn't random but can actually be cultivated? (Recorded at TED@BCG on ctober 23, 2025)

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

Transcript

00:04On January 7, 2025,
00:06our house, my wife's parents' house
00:09and most of our neighborhood burned down to the ground.
00:12On that day, I was about to submit a paper to a major management conference,
00:16and like a rookie,
00:17I had left it to the last hour and was stuck in the uploading queue.
00:21That's when the evacuation order came in
00:23for the LA wildfires in Pacific Palisades, where we lived.
00:27I found myself outside hosing down the house with one hand
00:31and holding the laptop with the other,
00:33desperately trying to get that document to upload.
00:36At that point, I thought that was my biggest problem.
00:39Turns out it wasn't.
00:40The document did upload.
00:42The hosing, however, did not work,
00:44and 24 hours later, our house was gone.
00:47I'll never forget the firefighting planes
00:49flying so low overhead as we evacuated.
00:52It felt like a really bad Hollywood movie.
00:55My wife was pumping breast milk
00:56as we were trying to get our newborn to safety
00:59and our toddler from preschool.
01:01That night in the hotel,
01:02as we tried to act as normal as possible towards the kids,
01:05my then-three-year-old daughter looked up and said,
01:08"I want to go home."
01:10You know, I've researched, taught
01:12and worked on the unexpected for over a decade,
01:15and I've seen a fair share of unexpected events myself.
01:18But this hit on a whole new level.
01:20In the days that followed, I tried to focus on the things
01:23that I could control.
01:24And surprisingly, there were micro-moments of joy,
01:27like unexpectedly bumping into old friends in the hotel that we evacuated to.
01:32And that experience was an unexpected
01:34and certainly not wished-for opportunity
01:36to practice the very serendipity mindset framework
01:39that I had been working on,
01:41and that can help us navigate those kinds of situations.
01:44More on that later.
01:45But first, let's talk about bad luck.
01:47It all felt like really bad luck.
01:50But when I reflected on it, I realized it was more than that.
01:54It was zemblanity.
01:56Zemblanity is when something unlucky, unwanted
01:59or undesired happens by design
02:02because it's already built in.
02:04It seems unexpected and like bad luck,
02:07but in hindsight it was to be expected and avoidable.
02:10In our case, the wildfires and the winds were the trigger,
02:15but the real misfortune was already built
02:17into the fragile system all around us.
02:19There was a lack of water in the water reservoirs and hydrants,
02:23a limited pre-deployment of fire trucks in the area
02:26despite the early warnings.
02:28Brush wasn’t cleared in the area, and a complete lack of coordination.
02:32It wasn't just one thing.
02:33In retrospect, we realized
02:35that it was a space of infinite negative possibilities
02:39where eventually misfortune was inevitable.
02:43The thing is, even when you try to do the right thing,
02:46in the system around you,
02:47zemblanity can still be baked in and you get caught up in it.
02:51What happened to us wasn't just bad luck.
02:54It was a pattern that I've seen everywhere,
02:56from wildfires to boardrooms to living rooms.
02:59The thing about zemblanity is it’s not just out there in big systems,
03:02like in the wildfire case.
03:03We see the same in companies with toxic corporate cultures,
03:07where it's just a matter of time that disaster strikes.
03:09And sometimes even in our own minds.
03:12Zemblanity is when we create our own bad luck.
03:16Take the traveler who leaves for the airport
03:18with exactly the time it's needed to get to the airport.
03:22Any small unexpected thing, like a minor traffic jam,
03:25and suddenly, the flight is missed.
03:28Or take the old man who is told to use his walking stick.
03:31He doesn't.
03:32One day he "unexpectedly" falls down the stairs.
03:35It might seem surprising in the moment, but it was to be expected.
03:39Zemblanity seems like bad luck, but it's already built in all along.
03:45Now before I go deeper into this,
03:47I want to ask you a question.
03:50In the room, who of you considers yourself to be a lucky person,
03:53please raise your hands.
03:54And at home, a mental hand-raise works too.
03:57OK, quite the lucky room, actually, well done.
03:59No worries, I won't ask the unlucky ones.
04:01We'll focus on the lucky ones for now.
04:05Those of you now who said
04:07you consider yourself to be a lucky person,
04:09who of you thinks they had some sort of role in it?
04:11Please put all modesty aside.
04:13Who thinks, hands up, had some sort of role in it?
04:15OK, still quite a few.
04:16Alright, so that's interesting, right,
04:18that on one hand, we know that luck is random,
04:21but on the other hand,
04:22already Louis Pasteur told us that it may favor the prepared mind.
04:26In order to visualize this, let’s look at the Luck Matrix.
04:30The Luck Matrix shows us the four different types of luck.
04:33Here, on the lower left, we see bad luck.
04:36Bad luck is something negative, unexpected, that happens to us.
04:40It happens to us, you can never blame anyone for bad luck
04:43and it creates a lot of societal inequality.
04:46Good luck, here on the lower right, is something positive.
04:49It happens to us, we didn't work for it.
04:51Just great if it happens.
04:53Zemblanity is the misfortune by design
04:57that we built into fragile systems or into the pattern and habits
05:01that kind of then ultimately lead us to disaster.
05:04And then the thing that has driven our research for the last decade
05:07is serendipity.
05:09Serendipity is the active luck
05:11that depends on how we engage with the unexpected.
05:14Blind luck happens to us,
05:16and active luck, serendipity, can be cultivated.
05:20Imagine you have erratic hand movements like I do.
05:23Then you spill a lot of coffee, right?
05:25So imagine you accidentally spill coffee over the person next to you.
05:29That person looks at you slightly annoyed,
05:31but you sense there might be something there.
05:33You don't know what, you just think, oh, that could be an interesting person.
05:37And now you have a couple of options, right?
05:39One is to just say, "I'm so sorry."
05:41You walk outside and you think, "Ah, what could have happened?"
05:44Another option is you start that conversation
05:46and that person becomes the love of your life
05:48or your cofounder or you name it.
05:50The point is, the eventual outcome, good or bad,
05:53depends on how we engage with the unexpected.
05:56And that's where serendipity emerges.
05:58Serendipity really is this unexpected good luck
06:01that results from unplanned moments
06:03in which our actions lead to positive outcomes.
06:06Let's look at an example.
06:07In 1968,
06:09Spencer Silver was trying to develop a stronger glue.
06:13Accidentally, he developed a weaker one.
06:16Seemed useless in the moment,
06:18until a couple of years later,
06:19his colleague Arthur Fry was using that weak glue
06:23to avoid having his bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal.
06:27That seemed quite useful.
06:29The Post-it note was born
06:30and became one of 3M's major products.
06:34Lots of examples out there of serendipity, right?
06:36From Velcro to microwave ovens
06:39to how people unexpectedly find love or their apartments.
06:42And a lot of times also
06:44when crises become the inflection point for something in one's own life.
06:48The point is that over the last decade we've studied serendipity,
06:52all these different stories of serendipity,
06:54and tried to understand, is there a pattern behind that.
06:57And it turns out there is.
06:58It's always the same process.
07:01There is an unexpected serendipity trigger, which is random, right?
07:04So the coffee spill or the weak glue.
07:08But then we have to imbue meaning in it.
07:10We have to connect the dots,
07:11we have to see what could be in that moment,
07:13and then we have to materialize it, right?
07:15It's not enough to just think, "This could be the love of my life."
07:18You've got to actually go on dates, right?
07:20And so the point is, once we look at it as a process, we can influence it.
07:24We can first learn how to see more serendipity triggers
07:28to try to focus on what is the information hidden
07:31in this good- or bad-luck moment.
07:34You know, for example, asking in weekly meetings,
07:36what surprised you last week?
07:38Very simple question,
07:39but then people start to focus on,
07:41is there some information in this, kind of, unexpected event
07:44that has just been happening here?
07:46Second, we can learn how to "seed" more serendipity triggers.
07:50And I'm not suggesting you spill more coffee.
07:52There [are] other ways,
07:53one of which is, at an event like this today,
07:56to put some rich information points out there, right?
07:59When someone asks the dreaded “So what do you do?” question,
08:02saying something like,
08:03"Hey, I'm Christian Busch, I study serendipity,
08:05but what I'm really curious about is parenting,
08:07because our four-year-old just learned how to negotiate.”
08:10And so what I'm doing here is I'm giving you a couple
08:13of potential connection points where you could be like,
08:15"Oh my God, such a coincidence, our kid also -- X, Y, Z."
08:18The point is, instead of having a pitch that's unidimensional,
08:21it's giving multidimensionality and potential dots
08:23that other people can connect for us.
08:26Then third, we can learn how to better connect the dots.
08:29For example, asking ourselves in unexpected moments,
08:32"Can I still find some meaning in this?"
08:34And then last but not least,
08:36we can also learn how to act more on it
08:38because that's where we miss serendipity very often.
08:41Think back in your life to moments
08:43where you saw an unexpected opportunity in the moment,
08:46but you didn't act on it, right?
08:47So maybe it was the unexpected idea in a meeting
08:51that you didn't bring into the meeting.
08:53Or you were flirting with a person on the bus
08:56when you were still single, of course,
08:58but you were flirting with that person on the bus,
09:00and you didn't speak with them.
09:02And then you walked outside and think, "Ah, what could have happened had I?"
09:05And there's a lot of reasons that hold us back in those moments, right?
09:09But one of the major reasons is fear of rejection, right?
09:12So in my case, for example,
09:14my brain immediately goes to
09:15what's the worst thing that can happen if I do this?
09:18The sting of rejection.
09:20One thing I've realized, though, and our research shows, is that actually,
09:24once you start to realize that that is not the real worst case,
09:29that the real worst case is the regret of not having tried.
09:34That feeling of walking outside and thinking,
09:37"Ah, what could have happened?"
09:38And so what can be really useful
09:40is this idea of reframing away from “What’s the risk of doing this?”
09:44to "What's actually the risk of not doing it?"
09:46And then we realize, the risk of not doing it
09:48is a lot of times much higher than the risk of doing it.
09:51So it gives us a bias for action.
09:53Now why is this serendipity mindset,
09:55this capacity to turn the unexpected into positive outcomes
10:00so important?
10:01Well because the unexpected is everywhere,
10:04whether we see it or not, and whether we like it or not, right?
10:07The likelihood of one specific unexpected event happening is very low, right?
10:13It’s very unlikely that the lady here yells at me
10:17or the gentleman here throws a peach at me, right?
10:20That's very -- I hope that's unlikely.
10:21I mean, you never know, but it's very unlikely in itself.
10:26But when you add up all the possible unexpected things that could happen,
10:30all these infinite, unexpected things that could happen out there,
10:33it actually becomes quite likely that something unexpected happens.
10:37And that's quite scary to me as a German, right?
10:40We love planning, we love having a strategy and straight lines.
10:43And then life is a little bit more like a squiggle, right?
10:46Where unexpected events come from everywhere.
10:48And so we have to build a muscle for that.
10:50And that is true for good luck,
10:53but it's also true for bad luck, right?
10:54The same alertness to our surroundings,
10:57the ability to connect our dots
10:59that helps us nurture serendipity,
11:01can also help us guard against the impacts of zemblanity.
11:04And you know, of course, mindset is not a cure-all, right?
11:07Our research also shows that things like education, networks, safety nets
11:12play a huge role when it comes to opportunity spaces.
11:15But on the individual level, for what is at our disposal,
11:18mindset is one of the most effective tools we have
11:21to nurture serendipity
11:22and guard against zemblanity.
11:24It's not toxic positivity.
11:26It's not ignoring pain, it's not ignoring grief.
11:29It’s accepting it, it’s working with it,
11:31and then saying, "What can I still control now?
11:33What can I still focus on now?"
11:35And, you know, in our case,
11:38there was a lot of pain around losing our house, right?
11:41And that doesn't really go away that quickly.
11:43I still wake up in the morning and think, how can that happen.
11:46But alongside it, something unexpected happened.
11:49It sparked new research.
11:51It gave me a renewed sense of purpose, and it rallied the community around us.
11:55I am far closer now with my in-laws, with whom we spend much more time.
11:58And so out of the ashes, something new is beginning to grow.
12:03Viktor Frankl, who has been a great inspiration to me,
12:06once said that "everything can be taken from a [hu]man but one thing:
12:10the last of the human freedoms --
12:12to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
12:15to choose one's own way."
12:18And I believe that's very true.
12:20We can't pick the fires, the storms, the crises,
12:23but we can choose how we meet them.
12:25And that choice is where serendipity begins
12:28as the unexpected starting point
12:30for a new chapter and potentially a whole new book.
12:33My hope is that we start building a world
12:37that is designing more for serendipity
12:39and guards against zemblanity.
12:41And the next time something unexpected happens to you,
12:44may serendipity be with you.
12:46Thank you.
12:47(Applause)