Hello Reader,

Have you ever heard about "serendipity"?

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Serendipity is the occurrence of a happy or beneficial event by chance.

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Many people have heard about serendipity, but I am always surprised by how few have experienced it in their research journey.

It feels like a light-bulb moment, those times when you shout “A-HA, I see it!” or “OH! I didn’t know that! That’s pretty awesome!”. Here is how Tyrone*, who joined the Prolific Researcher Mentorship programme last month, puts it:

In knowledge creation, serendipity happens when we find a connection between two ideas (or studies) that seemed disconnected before.

Finding the connection between seemingly disconnected ideas is the source of originality.

If you want a breakthrough, you better foster serendipity.

And yes, you don't need to leave it totally to chance. Instead, you can create methods to engineer breakthroughs.

But, how can you do it!?

I teach multiple practices that foster serendipity, but here is the simplest one:

1. Write down your thoughts (stop “just highlighting” or writing only a sentence in the margins).
2. Do it again, and again, and again.
3. When you are ready to speed up the process, break each idea into its own note (i.e. each note focusing on only one idea, with the title of the note serving as a name for the idea). This will help you SEE your ideas and more easily connect them.
4. Go back to step 1.

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If it looks simple, it is because it is simple. You don’t need a taxonomy of tags, a rigid system of folders, or the latest AI algorithm.

It is just you, your thoughts, and a few mindset tricks and methods to remove any barriers you have acquired in years of “bad note-taking” practices learned in school.

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But what does serendipity look like in practice?

As part of the mentorship programme, I invite each member to showcase their practice either through video or by writing an article. The goal is to learn from each other and get feedback.

To make the idea of “serendipity” more concrete, I invite you to watch William Bowles’ showcase in the video below*.

In this video, William explains how he was taking notes on a book he read on a plane when he suddenly started creating unexpected connections (around the 12-minute mark).

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It may seem William is just creating notes “at random”, but there is a method to it: a method to express his thoughts, a method to identify ideas among what he wrote, and a method to connect to his sources.

Each method aims to train your mind to work in a certain way and create those lateral connections.

The method itself is not what matters, your thinking skills are the actual goal for any note-taking and Personal Knowledge Management practice. So if you want to improve your knowledge creation skills, enrolments to the PKM for Research mentorship are now open. I would love to work with you in building your own practice.

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Talk to you soon. Meanwhile, let me know your questions and comments by replying to this email. I take some time to answer, but I read and respond to all emails.

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Until then, take care.
Bianca

* William and Tyrone have given me consent to make the comment and video public. I won't publicly share any content or comment made by a member of the programme without their explicit consent.