Serendipity, Generating Unexpected Ideas

The concept of serendipity is still not very common in Spain, although other countries such as England. When an Englishman is looking for something that was not by chance know who just had a serendipity. And that's what this concept is so strange. The serendipity does not fit into something that you are looking for but on the contrary. If you go to a museum to see a new exhibition and out of there with a new job or your soul mate, that's serendipity. That is, a happy and completely unexpected finding. The best known example of this occurs with the invention of Post - It. say that Art Fry, 3M employee, one of the most creative companies in the world, was driving a lot of glue in their work. One day, the calculations failed and everything went wrong. The result was a glue that just stuck. Any failure to poor Fry. He thought of a possible dismissal or in the row that fall from your head. It was something that certainly was not in his plans. With this in mind connected it to another situation that was facing a long time.

Fry sang in the church of his neighborhood and was always with slips of paper to separate the songs. Pieces of paper that is always falling, which was pretty uncomfortable for him. The connection was clear: use the glue that barely clung to hold, temporarily, their spacers in the score book. She tasted it and it worked. This gave him the brilliant idea to try also at work. If it had worked in his private life, why not see what happened in your department? This was probably the best idea of ​​his life since you became a millionaire and now probably be one of the most popular products from 3M. It was all a mistake, yes, but also through the mind of the worker who was not content to solve your little problem of singing. The serendipity works. But make no mistake, we can not leave everything to chance, to chance. The random part of all this lies in the stimuli. They are what we are bombarded continuously throughout the day. Depends on if we make them more or less successful in our company. The first thing to go is the serendipity we have a goal.

That is, it does not matter. If we have a network target to catch stimuli. People with many interests, such as artists or inventors, have several networks that help them capture many of these stimuli. So it is not uncommon to hear words like "look how funny, this I will apply for a project that I am now gone? or "this is about telling me, with that I could do this and that?. That is, you get a lot more out of things than others. All thanks to these "networks? mentally they are formed. They say that he who seeks finds. It's true. But serendipity not know which is exactly what we find. Surely something much better than we wanted.

The second step is to fill our heads with incentives to use them after our benefit. Here is why. Thousands of stimuli we riddled throughout the day and these are being picked up by your different senses for further analysis, classification and finally rejection or approval of the above. If the stimulus is irrelevant at the time, may be relegated to the subconscious forever. If, however, is something that touches the fiber will be something we experience consciously. Both affect us, the difference is that when we react to the first do not really know why we do it. It was something that has fallen far short of our consciousness and therefore we did not have it. But thanks to a given situation, it acts as a hook and extract that information from the cave of our unconscious. So much advertising is based on it. Advertisers know they put a bottle of Coke in one scene, ultimately, increase your sales. People are like that. So if we get a good idea by this method it is best to raise our curiosity, as does a child.

A third step to getting the most innovative ideas bring us failures or errors. Like what happened to Mr. Fry, we all have a cast of memorable failures. And if not, try to list the 10 biggest failures in your life. Then we can ask questions like: Did I learn anything about this? If so, remember what it was? What helped me? Was it necessary or could have been avoided? How? Learning from failure is important, but we go up a bit the difficulty of the task. Not only do we learn not to repeat, we gain an advantage. Turn around the problem and use to their advantage. That's what Art hico avoided not only a good row but his superior ... became rich. That's serendipity. Let's go to another track to get the idea of ​​our life. It is something so familiar and yet so valuable as a sense of humor. The humor will help us greatly in the previous point, because without humor is hard to play down the errors. Moreover, the humor is considered one of the basic ingredients for creativity.

Without humor no inhibitions and when we are tense or inhibited, there are no good ideas. Something similar happens in serendipity. We need humor to create new situations that inspire us. Many companies use humor as the basis of their creativity. Vueling offers indie music during the flight as well as series like The Simpsons or Friends. In addition, the commander off jokes and everything seems to be a game when they say that "preparations for takeoff, 3, 2, 1 ... Vueling!? Vueling is not the only company doing this sort of thing. The founders of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry's go further. Dress up in meetings or organize the day of free ice cream for which rent a van and go cow ice cream distributing themselves. Today they are one of the leaders in ice cream in the world. Constancia. That's the next step. For the serendipity appears in our lives do not have to hurry and above all, we must be constant. Although it may seem that others have happened quickly is seldom or never exactly. When we count the successes of others gives the impression that they have achieved it all with ease, by a stroke of luck.

But if you look closely at their lives, we realize we have been continuing to achieve its goal. Go back to Art Fry and Post - It. is true that the stimulus came only if there was a time to connect with the idea of ​​the score book. But then came a whole process of product development. The secretary sent hundreds of different cities in order to prove their new invention. There collected some impressions which earned him a lot to tweak and test it again. Gradually took shape that piece of paper that years later he would become rich. The ideas do not end when you find them. That's just the first step towards a process, sometimes too long. And finally the last step for our unexpected success. This is the action. He said X-Files, the truth is out there. And it's true. Many times we locked ourselves in our homes, our offices, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for a miracle. But it happens. Life is out there and is usually where to get the power of the unexpected find us. They walked Gutenberg quite lost in their desire to invent the printing press.

For many laps that gave not find a way to make books without the hands of the monks write to spark. Although he had a goal and an incredible motivation, which would be one of the greatest inventions in history, refused to appear so easily. This often happens in these cases. Until one day, decided to go for a walk. No one knows whether to take the cool and oxygenate your ideas, or to stretch their legs, the case is that the inventor locked ran into what would be the highest inspiration for his greatest achievement: a press for making wine. By observing how the press did its work quickly connected this idea with the problem that was around in his head too long. When these things happen we always wonder the same thing: the press today would it not been for that historic ride? Or even, would the press as we know it if I had found inspiration in another place other than the press of wine? We'll never know but the moral that we leave this beautiful story is that although we are as intelligent as the great inventors, it is necessary to draw on material that simply is out there.

Take a walk. Your ideas will be grateful. This is serendipity, a great way to generate good ideas and even a way of life. Creativity is the result, in its first phase, of an attitude, a way of life. The serendipity we provide it.