Serendipity - Front Spread

Serendipity is often portrayed as just luck - a happy accident that occurs at random, but actually there is more involved than just that.

serendipity

Leads To A Valuable And Unanticipated Outcome

Origins of the word In the Eighteenth century a British writer named Horace Walpole created the word Serendipity after reading a fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip,” it told the story of three brothers whose alertness and sagacity allowed them to consistently discover things that were far better than what they had been seeking.

He wanted a word that meant more than “luck” or “accident”.

He wanted a word that celebrated life’s sometimes happy unpredictability, but he also wanted a word that had to do with quality of life, a word that recognised the fact that “luck” comes most frequently to those who are aware, concerned, and wise.

Serendipity as defined by Walpole... “a quality of mind which, through awareness, sagacity and good fortune, allows one to frequently discover something good while seeking something else”.

Lucky people meet their perfect partners, achieve their lifelong ambitions, find fulfilling careers, and live happy and meaningful lives. Their success is not due to them working especially hard, being amazingly talented or exceptionally intelligent. Instead they appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of lucky breaks.

The powerful effect of good and bad fortune on people’s lives has caused one of America’s leading career counsellors to remark: “Each one of us could tell stories of how crucial, unplanned events have had a major career impact and how untold thousands of minor unplanned events have had at least a small impact. Influential unplanned events are not uncommon; they are everyday occurrences. Serendipity is not Serendipitous. Serendipity is ubiquitous.”

Luck does not just determine the success in people’s lives, it even affects the careers and success of scientists and politicians.

Perhaps the most famous example of such scientific Serendipity is Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. In the 1920’s, Fleming was working to develop more effective antibiotics. Fleming inadvertently left one of the petri dishes uncovered, and a piece of mould fell into it. By chance, the mould contained a substance that killed the type of bacteria in the dish, this chance occurrence eventually led to the discovery of the antibiotic that has saved countless lives.

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.

It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

William Jennings Bryan

Recent scientific advances in psychology and cognitive neuroscience show that the human species has evolved two distinct systems of thinking (‘two minds’) which are the foundations not only of our reasoning processes, but of our feelings and behaviours as well. Each of the two minds we all possess is a unique and valuable asset both in personal and professional life.

The analytical mind is the asset that our education and training sets out to nurture, condition and discipline from the time we start pre-school to the time we leave university, and beyond. The analytical mind gives us the power to compute, reason and problem solve. However it’s only 50% of the design spec that nature built into our species’ capacities for thinking, problem solving, creating, judging and deciding. Alongside the analytical mind, there’s the mental asset that goes largely unnoticed and largely untapped - the intuitive mind.

Intuition doesn’t seek “the truth” or even “sense”. Intuition is completely open to non-sense. It dives down into the depths of the unconscious where reason and instinct collide in unexpected ways, and it latches onto hidden connections and contradictions. Then it brings this information - via an unusual sign, a rare sensation, an unexpected feeling, or a seemingly irrelevant fact - to the surface of consciousness to feed the rational mind and enable logic to work with paradox.

Intuition empowers us to operate in the zone of ambiguity and change, the exact place where imagination and genius occur.

Insight enables the mind to make connections which haven’t been made before and enables people to see the world anew. Insight is about ‘seeing’ new connections, intuition is about ‘sensing’ new connections.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.�

Albert Einstein