How to Make Serendipity Work For You and Your Business
Regardless of our best-laid plans, it’s often the ideas and events that we least expect that end up mattering to us most. This has never been truer than in today’s chaotic, highly uncertain world. Serendipity—looking for one thing and finding another—is consequentially the root of much discovery in business, science, and the arts. Harnessing serendipity means being willing to follow unplanned paths when they emerge, yet by succumbing to opportunism we risk undermining all the work that got us to that point. This challenging paradox — how can we stay the course and also take new directions at the same time? — paralyzes most organizations as they grow beyond the nimble startup stage.
The solution, as demonstrated by businesses as diverse as Foursquare, In-N-Out Burger and the TED conference, is to stop seeing these contrasting skills Nof divergence and commitment as opposites, and instead marry them together. Being rooted to an overriding purpose is the only meaningful way we to decide which of our many possible paths are the right ones to take. The interaction between these seeming opposing approaches leads directly to the best kind of luck: When we are fully committed to something we serendipitously run into new directions that fall along our path, and recognize opportunities uniquely suited to us, even as others miss them completely.