Saying Yes to Serendipity
After Alaska, I returned to Taiwan partly to prove to my girlfriend Jian, now my wife of forty years, that I really would come back. I was twenty-five, carrying college loans, uncertainty, and a growing sense that my life was being shaped at least as much by openness as by planning.
One interview led unexpectedly to another opportunity, which became a sales role at Comdata. I knew very little about the industry. What I understood much better was people. I could often sense excitement, hesitation, fear, ambition, and uncertainty before someone had fully put those feelings into words. I connected quickly, listened closely, and learned fast.
A year later, after I had begun selling faster than the company could comfortably deliver, the founder introduced me to an executive recruiter I went to see in Hong Kong. Before I left, my boss at the time, Ted Fong, said something that quietly changed my life:
“If you can manage information and relationships, you can be an executive recruiter.”
The sentence landed instantly. I did not yet understand the profession, but I recognized myself inside it. Again, life had opened a door, and again I walked through. Only much later would I call that Supercharging Serendipity.
Looking back, many of the defining turns in my life emerged this way: curiosity first, certainty later. An introduction. A conversation. A strange invitation. A person who appeared at exactly the right moment. A path I could not have planned because I did not yet know it existed.
Serendipity is often described as luck, but that has never felt complete to me. Luck may create the encounter. Openness determines whether we notice it, and courage helps determine whether we enter it. When we are curious rather than excessively defended, we are more likely to speak to the stranger, follow the thread, enter the room, risk wasting an afternoon, or say yes before the outcome can be guaranteed.
That does not mean every coincidence is destiny or every invitation deserves a yes. Discernment matters. But a life organized entirely around certainty can become very efficient at excluding possibilities it could never have predicted.
I think of serendipity as popcorn beginning to pop just before the adventure movie starts. At first there is one small explosion, then another, and suddenly possibility seems to be appearing everywhere. Few people I know have lived that pattern more completely than Serge Dumont.
Serge Dumont
Steward of Serendipity
Serge’s life is a beautiful example of what can happen when serendipity meets readiness. As a teenager growing up in France, he
set out to widen his world, eventually hitchhiking across the United States. Taiwan entered his life almost accidentally, through the suggestion of a French friend. What began as exploration became a profound encounter with Asia, language, culture, and possibilities he had barely been taught to imagine.
That encounter changed the direction of his life. Serge learned Chinese, immersed himself in Taiwan, and eventually built a career connecting worlds that often struggled to understand one another. He later founded Interasia, an early communications and government- relations business in China, sold it to Edelman, became President of Edelman Asia and a member of its global board, and later served as Vice Chairman of Omnicom Group and Chairman of Omnicom Asia Pacific. His career grew not from one meticulously engineered plan, but from a remarkable willingness to keep entering complexity before the path was obvious.
That willingness mattered far beyond business. During the SARS crisis, Serge advised the World Health Organization in China and the Beijing municipal response, work that reinforced something he had learned repeatedly: in moments of fear and uncertainty, communication is not decoration. Trust, language, clarity, and the ability to connect people can affect what happens next. He later served as a UNAIDS Special Representative and continued building bridges across business, health, education, philanthropy, and culture.
His transition out of large-company executive life carries another lesson. Serge did not disappear when the title disappeared. He continued through boards, philanthropy, advising, relationships across continents, and institutions including Asia Society France, where he became founding chairman. The form changed, but curiosity and contribution remained.
Serge’s story reminds me that serendipity is neither randomness nor magical thinking. It is the meeting point between the unexpected and a human being sufficiently awake to recognize possibility.
Sometimes a whole life changes because someone says, “You should go to Taiwan.”
The wisdom is not in believing that every open door contains destiny. It is in remaining curious enough to look through the door, discerning enough to know when it matters, and courageous enough to walk through when something in you says yes.
That pattern shaped nearly everything that followed for me. Long before I had language for Supercharging Serendipity, I was learning one of its central practices: we cannot control the ocean of possibility, but we can become much more available to what arrives.