Serendipity as Career Navigation System

"So when you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?”"

"The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the companies you join or start will likely fail."

"And on that very special day, literally that very day, Edgar Scherick, the czar of ABC, was fired! Quite incredibly, they reached down in the organization and picked none other than the young and untried Leonard Goldberg to be the new head of programming. What a stupendously inexplicable stroke of luck. Serendipity, my lifelong lodestar, had made its first appearance."

"My eyes zeroed in on the last call—it was from another Davis, Marvin Davis, no relation to Martin. This Davis was the Denver oil tycoon who had recently bought 20th Century Fox. Marvin Davis had never before called me. But I knew, just intuitively knew, when I saw that name that this was going to be the key to my getting out of Paramount with more than my tail intact. I’m not conflating the timing of events here. It happened just this way: deciding once and for all that I had to leave and getting that phone call five minutes later. Somehow the gods must have decreed that I deserved a savior from *Martin* Davis, and he would be named *Marvin* Davis. In a lifetime filled with inexplicably serendipitous moments, this one topped them all."

"There was no straight line to my late-stage career. It made no linear sense. Opportunity came from the unintended consequences of disconnected situations that reconnected in serendipitous ways, as if some cosmic hand had been at work. That’s about the only explanation for how events that began to grind way back in 1977 would become one of my greatest, zigzagging-est adventures. It took almost two decades for all the disparate pieces to come together into opportunities I never could have imagined. It’s also a grand illustration of how the meandering paths of media have crissed and crossed in bewildering ways throughout my life."

"Between our lunch and the time Murdoch finalized buying into Fox, he’d gone to Australia, and then on his way back to New York stopped for two days in L.A. He called and I invited him to come over to the studio for a chat. And, here’s where my North Star of serendipity once again showed up: three seemingly disparate events threaded themselves into the opportunity of a lifetime—at least my lifetime. First, that particular day was Michael Milken’s annual investors’ conference, called by some the Predators’ Ball. Milken was at that time the biggest financier of companies in the United States. He had previously called to say he had just financed John Kluge’s buyout of public shareholders at Metromedia, which owned six blockbuster television stations. They wanted to have a reception away from the place where the conference was being held, and Milken asked, as a favor, if I would give them a soundstage to have it on. The afternoon of that day, Murdoch arrived in my office. And finally, as soon as Rupert sat down in my conference room to talk, my assistant buzzed me to say that Mike Milken and John Kluge were in my reception room to say hello before their party."