Why You Should Encourage Chance Into Your Creative Life
The power of serendipity to open up new creative pathways
If you’re a creative person, then you’ll know how inspiration can strike in the most unexpected moments, often at the most inappropriate times.
You’ll also know that the difference between intentional and unplanned inspiration is one of the more perplexing aspects of creativity. To create intentionally — to deliberately work towards a final result from a conceived design — can sometimes lead to a sterile outcome.
Yet it is serendipity that may help to tame the dilemma. Serendipitous creativity is about treating chance and happenstance as an deliberate aid to a better result, to help move away from the same grooves of your creative mind. It is about using the beneficial side of randomness to break through to new ways of doing things. In the fields of innovation and problem-solving, it’s about letting happy accidents reveal fresh ways forward.
Serendipity has long been recognized as a gateway to new inspiration. You might say, it’s a belief in the generosity of chance. If you are open to its diversions, serendipity can be a source of fresh-thinking. As the cognitive scientist David Kirsh wrote, “The power of chance lies in its departure from tradition.”
