3 Ways to Prime Your Mind for Serendipity. Get my FREE 20-page guide packed with information about redefining failure, understanding control, and challenging your cognitive biases. serendipitism.com/subscribe/

How to enhance your chances of serendipitous research discoveries timeshighereducation.com/cam… via @timeshighered

Empathy is a learnable skill that can bring us more success and improve our relationships and social interactions. serendipitism.com/more-empat… #empathy #opportunity #compassion

“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.” - Charlie Munger

Status quo and convention can commandeer our thinking before we’ve had a chance to consider anything radical or innovative. Sometimes it helps to flip the script and consider outcomes that are 180 degrees opposite our expectations.

Why the pursuit of happiness can be bad for you – and what you should pursue instead theconversation.com/why-the-… via @ConversationUK

"We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die." - Albert Camus

Look for the new among the familiar.

"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." – Winston Churchill

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next." – Jonas Salk

Intuitive thinking is always involved in the choices we make. It’s not a matter of choosing between intuitive and rational thought. The key is to use rational thinking to mediate our intuition.

"Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so." - John Stuart Mill

Too many people see happiness as a goal in itself, rather than as a temporary state of well-being that results from having achieved goals that are aligned with our higher values.

"If you want to understand the meaning of happiness, you must see it as a reward and not as a goal." – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Semmelweis reflex causes people to quickly reject new ideas that contradict an established paradigm or protocol. This kills creative thinking. We can’t be receptive to new ideas if we are prepared to reject them outright just because they run counter to the status quo.

Intuition draws heavily on past experience, and hunches are most reliable when you are operating in a domain in which you have considerable prior knowledge and practice.