Today is January 5 and the Navigate the Chaos question is “How often do you allow serendipity in your life?”
Serendipity is defined as the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
To further investigate the impact of serendipity on success, researchers continue to assess the role of chance events in personal and professional development.
For example, Deborah G. Betsworth and Jo-Ida C. Hansen asked 237 older adults if their careers were influenced by serendipitous events.
The results indicated that 63 percent of the men and 57 percent of the women felt that their careers were influenced by serendipitous events.
Researchers say that serendipity can be used to one’s advantage if individuals develop skills to recognize, create and use these chance occurrences as they think about their careers.
Critical attributes for taking advantage of serendipitous events are curiosity, persistence, flexibility, optimism, and risk-taking.
The backstories of Leigh Steinberg and Luis Echegoyen highlight the role of serendipity in one’s professional development.
The popular Tom Cruise movie Jerry McGuire is based on the life of a high-powered professional sports agent, Leigh Steinberg.
During the early 1970s, Steinberg was a student at the University of California at Berkeley, working his way through law school as a dormitory counselor and serving as student body president.
Steinberg planned to pursue either a job opportunity with the County District Attorney’s Office or opportunities in the field of environmental law. As luck would have it, the freshman football team moved into his dormitory.
He befriended several of the student athletes, including one named Steve Bartkowski, who went on to become an outstanding professional football player. During his final year at the university, Bartkowski was selected as the first draft pick of the Atlanta Falcons.
Bartkowski asked Steinberg to represent him in contract negotiations with the Falcons, and the rest is history because Steinberg has gone on to represent many professional athletes and other celebrities during the last 20 years.
Luis Echegoyen has held influential positions at major universities and the National Science Foundation, published extensively, and won national and international recognition for his work.
But in a career that spans nearly 40 years, there has been one surprisingly consistent theme: serendipity.
When Echegoyen spoke to a small group of 30 scientists and at a Summer Leadership Institute of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science in Washington, D.C., it was plain that he did not see serendipity as something light and whimsical. And he clearly wasn’t talking about blind luck.
Instead, he was talking about how scientists can structure their careers—and their lives—so that good but unplanned opportunities are more likely to emerge.
“Serendipity is not strange,” he said. “It’s the norm. It’s like mutations—it’s happening all the time…Of course you can’t go through life thinking, ‘Maybe something good will happen tomorrow.’ You should have some kind of a plan. “[But] be aware of the limits of planning—I can’t stress that enough. The more you connect, the more people you know, and the more diverse their backgrounds are, the better chance you have of something you did not anticipate happening.”
How often do you allow serendipity in your life?