Serendipity comes from Doing, not Wishing

Have you ever gone down the Google search rabbit hole?

Started reading something on Wikipedia ... clicked one of the reference links ... watched a related video on?YouTube ... got a whatspp link ... clicked on that... and found yourself on the other side of an hour, with the answer to a question that has been on the fringes of your memory for weeks -?who wrote the lyrics to "I Will Always Love You"? And that's not even what you started searching for in the first place!

Such lucky accidents are called serendipity -?unintentional chance encounters that lead to?beneficial results.

In his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,?Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks of creating "Good Black Swan" events in our lives - serendipitous events that lead to positive benefits.

Taleb named this strategy after Apelles - a Greek painter. Apelles was unable to paint the foam from a horse’s mouth. In irritation, he gave up and threw the sponge he used to clean his brush at the picture. The sponge created the perfect foam image he had been trying to paint!?

To follow an Apelles-style strategy is what Taleb calls?maximizing serendipity.

As Louis Pasteur noted: "Chance favors the prepared mind."

Science is full of serendipitous discoveries - urea,?dynamite,?saccharin,?penicillin,?nylon,?microwave ovens,?DNA,?implantable cardiac pacemaker,?ruins of Pompeii?and?Newton’s law of universal gravitation, and many more?(Source: Royston Roberts’s?Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science).

But all these inventions came only to people who were actively looking for solutions. Merely wishing and dreaming does not create anything but blissful daydreams.

It is the 'Doing vs. Wishing' that creates serendipitous luck.

My writing journey:

I have had a thirst to write for as long as I can remember. I started a blog in 2006. I was working in Bangkok and living alone, which left free time to binge-watch Sex and the City.? I managed to write two posts in which I sounded like a wannabe Carrie Bradshaw.

I was given three pieces of feedback by half a handful of people who read it. Edit. Edit. Edit.

Not wanting to put in the effort, I gave up.

In 2019, I attended a?writer's retreat?with three book ideas. The editors encouraged me, but the task ahead - researching and writing even one book seemed like a gargantuan task, and I did not make any progress.

A year passed by?with me doing nothing, only wishing to become a?writer. Then Covid struck and I was invited by my friend at Stir Fry MBA to pen down an article on the impact of Covid. I avoided it for weeks. I did not know what to write and could not ‘find’ my voice.

One day, while mopping the floor and listening to my favorite podcast, inspiration struck. My brain mirrored the podcast's tone, and entire sentences downloaded into my brain. Finally, I wrote something down.?The article was liked?and was picked up by?afaqs as well.?

With this, I realized it was far easier to write short pieces than a long book.?

I kept going. Four years and 1,41,000 words later, I continue to write.

Turns out?in order to be a writer, one has to write. Not just wish it.

Most of us want assurance that the effort we will put in will bear fruit even before we put in the effort. But the longer we wait, further away happy coincidences go.?Serendipity enters our life only when we get started rather than wait for everything to fall into place.

That's?what this campaign from Martini says.

Martini-Luck is an Attitude:

Same person - two outcomes. The one on the right engages with life around him and creates his own luck.

Japan Railways (JR):

Japan Railways (JR) did not wait for the perfect moment. They converted a happy coincidence into a profitable beverage business.

While constructing a bullet-train line through the mountains in North?Tokyo, they came across a flooded tunnel. The obvious solution was to pump out the mountain water, but they realized it was delicious. So they started bottling and marketing it?as premium mineral water - “Oshimizu”.

It became so popular that JR East installed Oshimizu vending machines on all of its 1,000 platforms.

Today, the brand has expanded to juices, iced teas, hot teas, and coffees, and JR has become a vending machine expert.?

Just for kicks - Do you know the opposite of serendipity?

Horace Walpole coined the term "serendipity" in 1754. He had based it on the The fairytale of?The Three Princes of Serendip?- they were constantly making discoveries of things they were not looking for.?[Serendip is the former name for Sri Lanka].

Serendip, is in the southern hemisphere. A land of spice and warmth, lush greenery, hummingbirds, sea washed, and sun warmed.

The opposite is a land where luck goes to die - Zembla - far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone.?The word 'Zemblanity' is the opposite of Serendipity. It is the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.

Finally, to close the loop on the Google rabbit hole, Dolly Parton wrote the lyrics to "I Will Always Love You".

Thanks for reading!