The prepared mind favors chance
Serendipity has been, and still is, a most intriguing concept to me, central to my philosophy of life as well as to pretty much all my research -both as a topic AND as an engine of progress. The core principle of my approach is that happy accidents don't happen very often to a human of average luck. So how does one beat the odds?
Whereas Louis Pasteur's famous adage -chance favors (only) the prepared mind- points to one mechanism for happy accidents (preparing one's mind), what is a prepared mind to do? Wait for chance to knock?
Luckily, or serendipitously, in 2004, Michael Schrage came up with a clever inversion that I have been using unashamedly ever since: "Prepared minds favor chance" (lnkd.in/g9dyr_6a).
I love it! It provides the prepared mind with an actionable strategy: a prepared mind, by virtue of being "prepared", can detect patterns from random encounters, which become stepping stones and building blocks toward new insights. Thus the prepared mind should foster a diversity of experiences and be open to the unexpected. You can do this in your life.
The other actionable strategy is technological: with a prepared mind, all one needs is a "chance generator" to be exposed to a diversity of stimuli. To be continued.
PS: after hitting the Post button, I checked whether Michael's article was the first mention of that inversion. I found an earlier version in a brilliant 1999 book chapter by Kevin Niall Dunbar (lnkd.in/gWi9CKzR) on how scientists build models. The book itself became accessible digitally in 2012, which may explain why it was not referenced.