Quotes about Serendipity

Whether she liked it or not, books always appeared when she needed them.

Schopenhauer's wonderful piece on 'An Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual': how the continuities of a lifetime seem, in the end, to have been plotted out by a novelist - all the accidents, apparently uncoordinated as they first occur, concurring finally toward the shaping of an order.

'In Guatemala our bus got stuck in the mud - it was aways getting stuck! The driver said, "I need five strong men to move the bus." (There were plenty of guys on the trip.) Joe, in his seventies, was the first one out of the bus.' (Lynne Kaufman)

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.

Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters--you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity

...maximize the serendipity around you.

What is the most overrated skill for an entrepreneur?

The most overrated skill is skill. Luck is more important. The entrepreneur gets credit for being this genius, when really he was just at the right place at the right time.

Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

Instead of being more organized or controlling in your approach, allow for serendipity. Happy accidents happen when you look side to side or up, not always forward. Don't stop planning. Rather step out of the tunnel. Put yourself in situations that allow for the unexpected. Life is situationally driven. Learning happens in context. Be ready when opportunities arise. The more space you've cleared in your life for something new, the more right things will happen. More or less.

All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

I am a firm believer in serendipity- all the random pieces coming together in one wonderful moment, when suddenly you see what their purpose was all along.

Sometimes history knocks at the most ordinary door to see if anyone is home.  Sometimes someone is.

The process of finding new uses for old things is not always intentional. Accidental discoveries sometimes enable firms to serve unexpected customers. Viagra and Minoxidil are examples of such happy accidents. The discovery that Viaga usage was associated with penile erections in some men was initially given little attention by researchers from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals when this "side effect" was first noted in clinical trails. The drug was originally developed to be a treatment for hypertension, and after that failed, it was tested as a treatment for angina. Once again the drug failed. But this time Pfizer researchers followed up on the side effect from their earlier study. They ran clinical trials of Viagra as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, which led them to discover a new application for this existing drug. Similarly, Minoxidil was originally sold in tablet form as a treatment for high blood pressure. A side effect of this medicine was unwanted hair growth. So researchers from Upjohn started examining if it could be applied to the scalp to increase hair growth in balding men. Significant growth was observed in more than half the subjects who used it, and Minoxidil is now marketed in the United States by Upjohn as Rogaine. Researchers at both Pfizer and Upjohn didn't anticipate these side effects, but both groups were creative because they were observant and persistent enough to find new use for an existing medication. In the right hands, nothing succeeds like failure.

Great leaders are paradoxical. They catalyze, rather control, the work of their teams. They have an overarching vision for the team but are not autocratic in the realization of this vision. Their eyes are open to whatever results occur--not just planned goals, because serendipity is a great innovator.

When I write about "realizations," I am describing a state in which a practitioner has wisdom of who she or he is, and has embodied that wisdom; it has become integrated into daily life, thoughts, and activities. We often view "awakening" as first step towards such realization. Awakening can occur in the blink of an eye, frequently through the direct, heart-opening (heart-breaking) transmission of grace from an awakened teacher.

The weblog possesses an unmatched ability to create targeted serendipity by presenting its self-selected audience with the news and trivia that is predictably interesting and useful. But the very idea of serendipity demands that the discoveries so provided be to some extent unexpected. When news stories are rigorously selected to align with predetermined worldview, human filters become little more than propaganda machines.