Serendipity

I love this word. I always wanted to use it in a real conversation, but being poor with words, I never got to do it.

Serendipity is an unplanned fortunate discovery. Serendipity is a common occurrence throughout the history of product invention and scientific discovery.

Why bring this up now?

A few days back, one of my colleagues asked me:

If you pitch OpenSpecimen to a prospective client, they ask for one week of free work done for them based on which they will decide whether to sign the contract or not. Will you do it for them? After that, if a client rejects you, don’t you think it’s a waste of resources and time?

This brought me to a larger question. Do you think long-term or short-term?

In the above scenario, doing something for a week costs time & money in the short term. But if it convinces someone to use our product, it means many more customers in the long-term.

Transaction Thinking

I call this “transactional thinking.” I.e., you treat every problem as an “independent transaction.”

You make a decision based on what you gain or lose from each transaction.

However, when you think of each transaction as a part of a bigger picture, your approach to problem-solving changes.

Here are a couple of analogies to understand this.

A bowler in cricket does not get a wicket in every bowl. Still, he/she keeps bowling with a plan in mind to get the batsman out. Does that mean all the non-wicket-taking bowls were a waste?

A farmer or a gardener does not expect every seed they sow to become a tree and give fruits. Most of them dont, but the ones which do will compensate for all the others.

Similarly, it would help if you analyzed your risks in doing something or not doing something.

Err on the side of doing

Most people don’t try enough new things since they are worried about failure. It also means you are missing out on many opportunities to learn and grow.

Instead, one should try a lot of different things in life. E.g., learning to code if you are a non-techie, stocks/mutual funds, starting a business, helping friends/parents with side projects over weekends, solo trips, etc.

When you do different things, you learn a lot in the process and gain maturity in handling situations/people. And you never know, it might open a new opportunity which might change your life (serendipity).

Mark Zuckerburg started Facebook as a side-project to share photos amongst friends. Bill Gates used to do many side-projects when in school for fun & learning. Warren Buffet started multiple businesses when he was a teenager.

Most successful people don’t start out thinking that they will do something big.

When I first started my entrepreneurial journey, my goal was to build a product for doctors. While that didn't work, something else came up, and over a series of failures and learning, I finally found success in developing OpenSpecimen. That is serendipity.

Keep trying different things, leave the ones that don’t work, build on the ones that work. Irrespective of what works and not, you come out wiser.