Structured Serendipity | Jason Zweig

Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries. Otherwise, your ideas are like carbon atoms randomly colliding with other atoms in the primordial soup without ever forming the rings and lattices of organic life. The challenge, of course, is how to create environments that foster these

The key, then, is to raise the likelihood that you stumble upon something valuable—namely, by courting good randomness and seeing the opportunities

“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” Johnson says that a key way to get more parts on the table is to put yourself in networks of other creatives who are striving for the same thing. He continues, “What kind of environment creates good

We should foster serendipity—the random collision of ideas.