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Serendipity: Cultivating the Art of Creative Luck
Creativity involves a whole load of luck. It is inherently unforeseeable. And being unforeseeable, creativity is bound up with luck and chance in interesting ways. When you get lucky and stumble upon just the right idea at just the right time, it can feel close to miraculous. When you are are feeling unlucky, it seems as if there is nothing you can do. But as a writing teacher, I have learned that the art of creative luck can be taught.
Sometimes students say that they don’t think they are very creative people. But I never believe them. Human brains fizz with creativity. The real question is how we channel, shape and maximise the creativity that we all have, and how we can use it to give shape to new things in the world. There is an art to being lucky; and it is an art that we can cultivate. To do so, we need to understand the relationship between creativity and chance.
In 1754, Horace Walpole wrote to his friend Horace Mann about a ‘silly fairy tale’ called Three Princes of Serendip. The story had its roots in Persia and was translated into Italian in the sixteenth century. From Italian, it was again translated into English, where it became popular in the English-speaking world. In the story, the Three Princes are, ‘always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.’ They have an uncanny knack…
