The Groove Issue 106 - How to Use Serendipity for Creativity
Welcome to the 106th issue of The Groove.
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HOW TO USE SERENDIPITY FOR CREATIVITY
A serendipity is a happy accident. Some people call it luck or coincidence. It’s finding one treasure when you were looking for another. It’s saying yes to something that falls in your lap even when you aren’t completely sure about it. It’s having the openness of mind and spirit to let something unforeseen unfold into new opportunities.
Every time I send this email out, I always get answers from many of you saying that it was exactly what you needed to read that day.
From an entrepreneur who wanted confirmation that she was on the right path when she decided to open her own business to a creative director who doubted sending a presentation to one of the largest marketing firms in the world fearing that they wouldn't get his concept (he sent it after getting The Groove that day and the agency execs were blown away by it), this is what I call being open to serendipities and going along with them.
While serendipities are unexpected, it’s the way we act or react to them that determines the outcome. The two people I mentioned above didn’t just think that the newsletter I had sent was encouraging. They acted on it. They registered a trademark, found a space to lease, made a phone call, pressed the “send” button.
How Serendipities Created Success in Sol Lewitt’s Career
Sol Lewitt in his Manhattan studio in 1961.
Sol Lewitt became one of the most influential figures of his time, opening the door for conceptual and minimalist art to take shape through wall drawings whose sketches and instructions were created by Lewitt’s hands but were executed by someone else, making the work transcend artist, time, and space.
But it was a series of serendipities over many years of accepting and acting on them that paved the way for Lewitt’s fame and fortune. Because leaving a mark in history and doing what nobody else had done before is not a one-time linear event, but a series of thousands of small moments and decisions interconnected to one another. Serendipity plays a vital role in creativity.
Being open to possibilities is a prerequisite for serendipities to unfold. Lewitt said that in the summer of 1950 he got a “little bit of good luck” when a friend told him to submit his lithographs for an award from the Tiffany Foundation, which he did, and won. The prize was $1000 (roughly $13,000 today).
That pushed him to do more lithographs, so he made a deal with the Hartford Art School to use their press, which allowed him to get better at that medium, and make more money selling them. With the money from the award plus the sale of the lithographs, he traveled extensively in Europe, developing a new point of view and making his experience as an artist more robust and interesting.
Sol Lewitt’s Wall drawing #1091 executed in 2014 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australia.
When he came back from that trip, he was “randomly” offered a job as an art director of Seventeen Magazine, because he was so good with prints and paste-ups. After that, since he had accumulated so much experience in different areas, he got a position as a graphic designer at the studio of the legendary architect I.M. Pei. Here, amidst blueprints and renderings, Lewitt started thinking more and more about the interactions between art, space, and design.
While Lewitt had been working on his art all along, especially on his three-dimensional sculptures, he had also wondered how to do something totally flat, in 2-D, that also had a geometric feel of imprinting 3-D qualities to it. And after many more serendipities, including a job at MoMA where he met Dan Flavin, who at the time was a guard there, and who inspired Lewitt to think about creating art that was a self-contained system, he eventually painted on the walls of the inaugural show of the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1968.
54 years after Lewitt’s first wall drawing at Paula Cooper, the same gallery just opened “Wall Drawings and Structures” an exhibition across their two spaces in Chelsea on 21st street, on view until October 22.
The genius thing is that while anyone can make a wall drawing or a mural, Lewitt’s years of experience helped him design a “system” where he was selling his conceptual work with the diagram and instructions that anyone could execute. They could live forever anywhere the owner moved and for as long as they wanted to have it. This was the tipping point of his career. He was doing something that nobody else had ever done before.
If he wouldn’t have seen each one of these odd jobs and disjointed events as serendipities, if he wouldn’t have gone on those trips, or viewed the conversations with Flavin, or the invitation by Paula Cooper, as happy accidents, Sol Lewitt’s career would have taken a very different route.
Does Luck Even Exist?
British psychologist Richard Wiseman came up with an experiment for a BBC show featuring two people, one self-identifying as lucky (“good things happen to me”) and one self-identifying as unlucky (“good things happen to others”).
The two people were directed to go into a coffee shop. Wiseman placed a £5 bill outside and hired an actor to play a successful businessman next to the coffee counter. The "unlucky" person stayed focused on the task of getting the coffee, not noticing the bill and left quickly, while describing this outing as “uneventful”. The "lucky" person saw the bill on the floor, picked it up, and felt a tingle of electricity in his body. He got his coffee but didn’t leave until having a conversation with the actor businessman and taking his business card. He described wonderful luck at the coffee shop.
There are many more serendipitous moments every day than we care to see and acknowledge.
Serendipity happens when we act but also when we are willing to imagine different possibilities and we create situations where they can develop.
Christian Busch, the author of the book, The Serendipity Mindset, asks us to be open to finding meaning in the unexpected. Much like Lewitt, who took different jobs that were out-of-the-blue opportunities, acting on serendipities requires us to do something new and sometimes to deviate from an existing plan.
So much that happens in our lives is unpredictable and unexpected, so we might as well capitalize on the moments that don’t happen as planned as much as on those “coincidences” that confirm that we are on the right track. I bet that if you go out today looking for them, you’ll find them.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members of my online course, Jumpstart.
If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
Have you already gotten your copy?
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook.
TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.