The Unplan

Opening Up Room for Serendipity

What are the best moments you have had in your life? The coolest things you have done? The memories you like the most, and the people you met that you like the best?

Have you thought about how they happen? Were they something you planned out, or did they happen more or less by chance? Were they part of your plan, your daily routine? Or were they a bit daring, when you tried something you weren’t quite sure of?

When I reflect about my own “best moments,” I find they happened largely by chance. Not only on the professional side, like going to India to study business and landing an internship in Europe, but also on the personal side, such as when I met my girlfriend. All these things involved not quite following my previous plans, and going a lot off what I was “supposed to do.” In fact, if I had only minded my own business and followed my own plan, I would never have ended up in Kansas for some of the best years of my life.

I would love to believe that my own awesomeness and foresight were the sole drivers of the cool stuff I have experienced in life. But that is not really the truth. In fact, on a broader perspective, if we are sincere to ourselves, the most remarkable experiences we have tend to come from events we had little control of.

On my current job at the Kauffman Foundation (a job I landed because I had a good deal of luck on my side), one of my tasks is to interview successful entrepreneurs, mainly CEOs and founders of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. Not surprisingly, many mention serendipity as a critical success factor. They were at the right place at the right time. They couldn’t really predict what would happen, but they went off their routines and tried something new. And there is the key: although they could not really know what would happen, they knew they had to do something different from their daily routine. They gave chance a chance.

Too often we try to design complex plans ahead of time, long before we know what life will really be like. How many friends we know who were sure about their dream careers, but changed majors after a couple of classes on the field? Giving chance a chance is not about giving up the control of our lives to randomness, but rather recognizing and knowing what we have no control of. And, most important, make the best out of it.

Arnobio Morelix is a social entrepreneur at PESSOA Institute

*This story was first published at the UDK