(2022-01-07) Johnson The Serendipity Engine

Steven Johnson: The Serendipity Engine. When I first began sketching out the structure for this series, one of the core questions I came up with was: “How do you surprise yourself?” It’s one thing to develop tools and practices that help you keep track of your ideas, or cultivate them over time. But what about techniques to help spark a new idea, something that would not normally have occurred to you? How do you set up a work environment that encourages the kind of serendipitous discovery I wrote about in the previous installment of this series? ((2021-12-10) JohnsonSevenTypesOfSerendipity)

Brian Eno’s instrument-switching studio technique is, on a structural level, similar to what I was reaching for with the Roulette Wheel exercise: they’re both randomizers, both ways to deliberately add unpredictability or noise into your thinking practice. I think of them as serendipity engines. You need them to shake things up.

I suspect most creative people incorporate some kind of serendipity engine.

I’ve already mentioned one that I rely on constantly: ReadWise’s daily emails

Then there are tools like the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards that Eno designed many years ago.

brilliant strategy he’d devised as a creative prompt: he’d stand in front of his bookshelf and pick two books randomly, and then force himself to deliver a short, spontaneous speech connecting the topics of each book

Honestly, though, the primary serendipity engine in my workflow is a much more prosaic one: Twitter.

It’s a true cabinet of wonders.

Twitter works so well as a serendipity engine for me for two reasons. First, I’ve deliberately cultivated an eclectic, multi-disciplinary group of people that I follow: musicians, architects, machine learning experts, epidemiologists, film buffs, and more. And thanks to its abbreviated format, Twitter is extremely skimmable,

Another, related, serendipity engine that has a lineage that goes back to the earliest days of the Web is following a talented curator (curation), someone who has a gift for putting together strange and delightful links that are not just takes on the current news cycle

A lot of the workflow strategies I’ve written about in this series are the intellectual version of tending to a garden: dutifully planting your hunches in the soil, cultivating them, crossing breeds to encourage hybrid vigor. But every now and then you want some exotic seed from elsewhere to float in uninvited, take root. (digital garden)