Serendipity: A Life Worth Living

Some words linger in your brain. For me, it’s serendipity. I don’t know why it does, but it lingers on the periphery of my mind.

Serendipity

Serendipity is making fortunate discoveries by accident. Serendipity is having fun with optionality.

I googled serendipity, just looking for examples of serendipity from the business world (there are plenty). Instead, I found something else in a fortunate way. What I found were two new words.

• Zemblanity – making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design
• Bahramdipity – the suppression of serendipity.

Serendipity is a way of life. You can find it anywhere as long as you are open to it.

The Linear Path

When I look back to where I am vs where I was, the path isn’t linear. I don’t know why I thought the path would be linear, but I did. Before we get into why linear doesn’t work, let’s dive into serendipity.

The reality is that nothing is linear. When we pretend it is, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Planning for a path between two points because it is the easiest path for our brains to see.

An example of our linear thinking comes in career planning. Often, people focus on progressing into their manager’s role. If they want to progress in a career in finance, they study finance over and over again. The problem is these paths rarely work. Life puts too many roadblocks in your way for the linear to work most of the time.

Once you embrace that the path from where you are to where you are going isn’t a straight line, there is no next logical conclusion. It’s chaos. So you have no choice but to embrace it.

How does one embrace chaos? Simple, by partaking in serendipity.

Nothing is linear. Embrace serendipity.