Should we look for serendipity everywhere?

Serendipity is an essential ingredient to increase the success factors in one’s life. It consists in multiplying the opportunities by resorting to chance, at least by provoking luck. Luck is necessary at all levels of one’s life, but should one look for it all the time and everywhere? Let’s see together some elements of answer to this question.

Do not fall into the syndrome of the shiny object

Serendipity is sometimes confused with the inability to focus on one thing before assimilating the skills needed to succeed. Serendipity is like spices in a dish, you have to know how to dose it, most often sparingly, at the risk of not making real progress in a field. Anything new creates excitement. The problem with always trying to find something new is that you end up going around in circles like a boat moving with the wind. To overcome this problem, you must have a course that you maintain. Serendipity can take the form of a favorable wind or swell on our path. Even though it may seem like we’re off course, we’ve actually found a faster way to get to our goal. This is how to consider serendipity, it is not a magic ingredient that will make us get from point A to point B without any effort on our part.

Finding the right mix of serendipity

Each profession is characterized by a higher or lower degree of serendipity. A researcher or an artist is obliged to confront new ideas and concepts constantly if they want to progress in their field, at the risk of being left behind by their peers. Conversely, there are other professional categories that emphasize values more important than serendipity (such as security, autonomy or reliability). For the latter, it will not be as important to place serendipity as a central element in their career strategy. As such, one can think of professions such as jeweler, banker or bodyguard. Each of these professions is organized around much stronger values, respectively meticulousness, confidentiality and reliability. It is up to you to see how much serendipity is needed in your field.

To become a master in a field, you must at some point reduce serendipity

In any case, a certain degree of tolerance to some form of boredom is necessary to excel in a field. Learning a skill sooner or later leads to reaching a plateau. Those who become the best (the masters) of a discipline, manage to have the patience to wait the long months sometimes years to go beyond the plateau they are in. Of course, they do not sit back and wait for the situation to resolve itself. On the contrary, they look for all possible solutions to their problem. So in this case, they may call upon serendipity, not to find an excuse to do something else, but instead to discover new ways to solve the same problem they are facing.

Create a system that allows for serendipity

It can be tedious or even difficult to always insert serendipity into your life. You can network, travel regularly, talk to strangers, etc. The problem with this approach is that it is energy consuming and time consuming. It is much more interesting to create a system that naturally attracts serendipity to oneself rather than constantly seeking it elsewhere. In short, it is better to be in the “pull” rather than in the “push”. How can we change our approach so that opportunities present themselves to us rather than being in the anxiety of always looking for them?

Three important keys to turn the situation around

Bringing value

If you don’t have a mindset of bringing value, it will be difficult to truly attract serendipity to you. In a nutshell, you have to put yourself in the shoes of your interlocutors, so as to try to understand what they need and to try to meet their expectations as best as possible, within the reasonable limits of your resources in time and energy, as well as to really want to do it. Providing value is a mindset that needs to be constantly developed and may take time. This is nevertheless essential before considering the other two keys to “passive” serendipity.

Use levers to increase your value tenfold

Once you have changed your mindset regarding your relationship with others, you must then take advantage of tools that allow you to share value automatically. This can be through video, blogging, podcasting etc. The key is to make this value transmission not dependent on your time and energy.

Develop marketing skills to reach more people

Once you have the first two steps of passive serendipity in place, you finally need to develop the marketing skills to help you spread your value to as many people as possible.

Once that’s in place and you consistently continue to deliver value using technology and marketing levers, you’re going to naturally have new opportunities come your way. It will be up to you. Remember, this takes time, you also have to be patient and believe in the process.

To deepen a relationship, you must stay focused

You can decide to introduce the idea of serendipity in your relationships, meeting new people. Nevertheless, you must avoid abandoning old valuable relationships under the pretext that you are looking to increase your serendipity. Here, the reflection to have is the same as to become a master in a field, you cannot spread yourself too thin. A relationship is like a skill, it requires time, energy and patience to gain depth.