Literally. Take a wrong turn on purpose. Drive to the next town over with no agenda. The best coffee you’ll ever have is behind the unmarked door you walked past a hundred times.
Most of us stop at step one. We call it an inconvenience and scroll our phones. In the modern world, we have declared war on serendipity. We optimize. We schedule. We use GPS to avoid every side street. We let algorithms feed us music, news, and even romantic partners based on what we already like.
The result? A filter bubble of the soul. We never stumble upon the bookstore we didn’t search for. We never hear the band whose name we can’t pronounce. We lose the “friction” that produces surprise.
So, the next time the universe throws a wrench in your plans—when the bus is late, when the rain soaks your shoes, when the internet goes out—don't curse the chaos.
It was a rainy Tuesday in Boston when Dr. James H. Austin, a neurologist, missed his bus. Frustrated, he ducked into a quiet library to wait out the downpour. Bored and cold, he picked up a dusty medical journal he would never normally read. Inside, a single sentence about a rare side effect of a common drug caught his eye. That sentence would later spark a breakthrough in how we understand dopamine and lead to a new treatment for Parkinson’s disease.
Lean into it.