Insiders guide to serendipity

The Insider’s Guide to Serendipity

The ultimate guide to serendipity in business and life.

Serendipity – others call it luck or Divine Intervention – means a “fortunate happenstance” or “pleasant surprise”.

It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754.

In a letter, he wrote to a friend explaining an unexpected discovery he had made by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendipity.

The princes, he told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things that they were not in quest of”.

I may not be a Buddhist, but serendipity or Divine Intervention has a great influence on my success.

Chance

At 25 and penniless, having the wish to start my business without any cash was next to impossible. But a serendipitous moment in a Yahoo business chatroom brought me to my 21st century “EUREKA”!

Believe it or not, but an online stripper had given me the idea that any skill/idea/talent can be sold as a product.

Seeing her one-liner – “Hundred bucks for a twenty-minute show” – move in an upward trend in the Yahoo chatroom gave me a smile of hope.

As the stripteaser’s advert started trending in the chatroom, I wrote and published the following advert line for my online English teaching lessons “Study English with Mary Moore”.

From that trial-advert, my first student from Alexandria, Egypt had enrolled, and the rest was history.

I see parallelism of my experience with other artists, inventors, and business people.

Parable of the sower serendipity

To mention a few, Archimedes, Newton, Marie Curie, Super Glue, and Post-it Note to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ruins of Pompei, (Viva Varun: In Koh Samui!) and many other discoveries.

Serendipity had a role to play in all the accomplishments of those businesses, inventions, and endeavors.

What I had in common with these people was the wish to do something, and the perseverance to pursue the lightbulb-idea to discover some opportunities.

This was the content of the trial plug for my online English teaching which started the English with Mary Moore, LLC.

Examples of serendipity in business

Serendipitous experiences are vital both in the creative and business realms.

According to James Heaton;

Serendipity is a combination of things: actively setting up opportunities, a willingness to go with the flow of events, the ability to see the thing that arises by chance, and finally, being ready to seize the opportunity—prepared both in the sense of being open to the possibility and ready to take advantage of it.

Serendipity

Serendipity is a significant factor in both the creative process and the business process

These are valuable ideas to anyone in business.

If I look at how companies are linked up in a cycle of sellers, employees, customers—they all have this one thing in common:

They all emanated from some linkages of random, circumstantial connections that led to the formation of an event.

Serendipity has occurred to me in many circumstances and I have developed a particular kind of faith in it. And when serendipity occurs, there is some unexplainable and uncontrollable flow of events.

I can certainly learn that serendipity happens as it did the way I started and developed my business.

Use serendipity engines (Twitter, blogging, Facebook, Linkedin)

My serendipity, as it happened in the 21st century was a far cry from the people who were before me.

My “luck” happened on the Internet. I started in a chatroom, then used all serendipity engines like Linkedin, blogging, websites, chatrooms.

I am not a great blogger, but 100% of my business was forged through social media.

By networking, joining online groups, sharing my thoughts and ideas, my serendipitous moments had started to unfold.

Through social media management, the rate of meeting the right people at the right time and place occurred.

Luck chance serendipitous

Facilitating or inducing Serendipity using Social Media

In facilitating serendipity through social media, the posts, blogs, or content must be goal-directed.

The goal is to meet people and create synergistic relationships that may lead to the fulfillment of your vision.

With the well-written materials, appropriate keywords, and with the utilization of search engine optimization (SEO) to increase your post’s or blog’s searchability, the possibility of chance encounters is higher.

By focusing on your target audience’s interests, giving them some inspirational posts, problem-solving blogs, and helpful tips, there is a greater chance of encountering like-minded people.

Mary D. MooreDr David Fuschi PHD

Written by: Mary D. Moore & Dr David Fuschi, PhD

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-make-happy-accidents-happen-more-often-1148657518
http://edinburghbiosciences.com/serendipity/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pandre/pubs/note0669-andre.pdf

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