Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Photo by lenia.

I often talk about Serendipity. People sometimes call me lucky and I don’t like that.

Being lucky means sitting at home hoping that one day you win the lottery.

Serendipity is more subtle and requires more effort than luck.

Anyway, here is the earliest use for the word from the Wikipedia entry for Serendipity:

“I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity?”

But the best desciption for what Serendipity is comes from Julius Comroe:

“Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter.”