Serendipity as Career Navigation System

“So when you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?””

“The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the companies you join or start will likely fail.”

“And on that very special day, literally that very day, Edgar Scherick, the czar of ABC, was fired! Quite incredibly, they reached down in the organization and picked none other than the young and untried Leonard Goldberg to be the new head of programming. What a stupendously inexplicable stroke of luck. Serendipity, my lifelong lodestar, had made its first appearance.”

“My eyes zeroed in on the last call—it was from another Davis, Marvin Davis, no relation to Martin. This Davis was the Denver oil tycoon who had recently bought 20th Century Fox. Marvin Davis had never before called me. But I knew, just intuitively knew, when I saw that name that this was going to be the key to my getting out of Paramount with more than my tail intact. I’m not conflating the timing of events here. It happened just this way: deciding once and for all that I had to leave and getting that phone call five minutes later. Somehow the gods must have decreed that I deserved a savior from *Martin* Davis, and he would be named *Marvin* Davis. In a lifetime filled with inexplicably serendipitous moments, this one topped them all.”