When Circumstances Take Shape
By Sophie Makonnen
Connecting the Dots
A few weeks ago, a colleague that we will call Nathalie shared her frustration. She was covering for a supervisor on extended leave and found herself stretched thin, with more meetings, more deadlines, more responsibility. “I’m exhausted,” she told me. “It’s just too much.”
I nodded. We've all experienced moments when a temporary assignment feels more like a burden than an opportunity. She had been asked because of her strong work and the trust others placed in her, but she didn’t need me to be preachy, just someone to listen.
Interestingly, a few weeks earlier, she had mentioned her wish to pursue a graduate diploma in a cutting-edge field. She was genuinely excited about it, but there was a catch. She needed a letter of recommendation confirming that the program was relevant to her current role.
“I don’t know who would write it,” she had sighed. “It’s not officially part of my job.” And that conversation ended there.
Fast forward. That extra workload put her in new meetings, introduced her to senior colleagues, and gave her unexpected visibility. When she mentioned her interest in the diploma, a senior colleague offered support and said the organization would be glad to provide the letter. He also added that they were aiming to strengthen their expertise in that very field and wanted their staff to be among the leaders shaping its application and understanding.
Only in telling this story did she realize what that period had made possible. What had begun as frustration had led her directly to the opportunity she needed. The very experience that stretched her capacity also made her visible. Indeed, it confirmed for some what they already knew, revealed her abilities to others, and validated her own sense of direction. To add, she also validated that her intuition about the skills she wanted to build was right and that support was closer than she thought.
It’s tempting to call that luck, but as the saying goes, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. What she experienced was the quiet alignment that becomes possible when we stay open, curious, and willing to move, even when the path isn’t comfortable.
This reminded me of The Serendipity Mindset by Christian Busch, who writes that serendipity isn’t about passive luck but about what he calls “smart luck.” Busch describes how chance encounters and unexpected situations can become meaningful when curiosity and awareness meet action. He calls it the serendipity formula: spot, connect, and act. My colleague may not have known it, but by sharing her interest in the diploma, she had already created what Busch refers to as a “hook”; an opening that invited connection. For Busch, people who stay open to reinterpretation, who are willing to see coincidence differently, are the ones who turn unplanned moments into opportunity.
Two key insights emerge from Nathalie’s story.
Curiosity Keeps the Door Open
Curiosity is what keeps us engaged with the world. My colleague wasn’t chasing an opportunity when she mentioned the diploma. She was simply talking about something that interested her and that she wanted to learn. She was expressing a desire to acquire new skills and knowledge. This openness, expressing an idea, sharing an interest, wanting to explore new areas, became the bridge to what followed.
Curiosity doesn’t need a strategy or plan. It needs space, action, and time. When we stay connected to what genuinely sparks our interest, conversations often unfold in ways we couldn’t have planned. It draws people in, signaling energy and engagement that others naturally want to encourage. In professional settings, especially in structured organizations, curiosity can quietly counter inertia. Growth doesn’t always come from formal training or promotions. It often emerges in the natural flow of work, when attention and openness meet opportunity.
As Rachel Wells writes in her article, 3 Reasons Curiosity Is An In-Demand Leadership Skill, curiosity is a leadership skill that expands awareness, fuels creativity, and strengthens adaptability. It allows professionals to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and notice possibilities that might otherwise go unseen. In that sense, curiosity doesn’t just open doors; it helps us recognize which ones are worth walking through.
Curiosity isn’t just about asking questions. It’s about staying attentive to what they reveal and letting ourselves learn from what follows.
When Difficulty Shifts the Context
Some situations really are unfair or exhausting. It’s important to name that. But occasionally, those same moments also change the context. They place us in new spaces, around new people, or in view of those who had not seen our work before. What first feels like imbalance or overload can sometimes create visibility we did not expect. We can turn those moments into opportunities.
The way we respond to difficult circumstances can shape our path, sometimes changing its direction. For better or for worse, since sometimes we do not make the best decisions, especially when we are tired or under pressure. The decisions we make in those moments, even when choices feel limited, can set new directions in motion. Over time, what once seemed like a detour can reveal itself as a turning point.
We rarely see these shifts in the moment; they become clear only in retrospect. Awareness lets us see how challenges and change reshape our trajectory, even if they do not erase the difficulty.
The point is not to glorify adversity but to notice how small acts of curiosity and adjustment can transform constraint into possibility. Resilience, in this sense, is less about endurance and more about perception, about recognizing the quiet potential inside disruption.
When the context sets the pace of opportunities
So it comes back to the fact that it is not about instant gratification. Careers and professional growth take shape over time, through persistence, patience, and the steady work of showing up. Opportunities often unfold slowly, and the wait can be discouraging. We learn as much from our mistakes as from our progress, and that learning is what sustains a career over the long run.
Career development is not always linear. Contexts shift, priorities change, and even values that once seemed widely shared can be questioned or rolled back. These reversals can feel personal, especially for those whose contributions are too often overlooked or minimized because of systemic dynamics, including persistent biases, organizational norms, or practices that give more space to some voices than others. Yet, continuing to learn, adapt, and hold steady in those moments becomes its own quiet form of resilience and integrity.
Way forward ?
Although Nathalie faces uneven roads, her determination keeps her moving forward. In challenging moments, pausing to shift perspective can help. Early self-awareness, recognizing and responding to our own signals, makes the journey smoother and more encouraging. Noticing these signs sooner enables us to move ahead with greater confidence and resilience. Noticing these signs sooner may help us avoid feeling dragged along by circumstances and regain a sense of steadiness and control over the course of our lives.These questions may prompt a new way of looking at the situation:
a. Instead of “Why is this happening to me?” → “What might this be revealing about me or my work?”
b. “What am I learning from this situation that could strengthen me for what comes next?”
c. “What is different in this position or context that I could build on?”
I will leave you with this quote : “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” ( Sun Tzu)
I’ve always been curious about the stories behind words, and “serendipity” has one that’s too good not to share.
Origin and History of the word “Serendipity”
The word serendipity means the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries. “Serendip” (also Serendib) is an old Persian name for Sri Lanka. It comes from the Arabic name Sarandib, which is in turn from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa. It was coined by Horace Walpole, an English writer, in a letter to Horace Mann, a British diplomat, dated January 28, 1754, though it was not published until 1833. The two men exchanged hundreds of letters, which together form one of the most important collections of 18th-century English correspondence. Walpole explained that he formed the word after reading the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (an English version appeared in 1722, translated from French, which itself was based on an earlier Italian version that had inspired several European adaptations): “as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”
Attention was later drawn to the word in an article in The Saturday Review (June 16, 1877) that remarked, “An ungrateful world has probably almost forgotten Horace Walpole’s attempt to enrich the English language with the term Seren
dipity.” The term began to appear more frequently in publications in the 1890s, though it was still absent from the Century Dictionary in 1902. Merriam-Webster indicates that it appears in a book on fishing published in 1910. Walpole seems never to have used the adjective.
The history of “serendipity” did not end with Walpole. As the nineteenth and twentieth centuries unfolded, the word slowly gained traction in the scientific community and popular culture. Some of the most celebrated discoveries in modern science—such as penicillin, X-rays, Viagra, and even microwave ovens—are often described as classic cases of serendipity, where unexpected results emerged from the happy intersection of accident and sagacity. Interest in the term deepened further when sociologist Robert K. Merton and historian Elinor Barber undertook a scholarly study of “serendipity.” Their manuscript, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, completed in the late 1950s, remained unpublished for decades before finally appearing in English in 2004. In this work, Merton and Barber traced the genealogy and cultural impact of the term, helping to clarify and popularize its meaning in academic and everyday contexts. The journey of the word itself—from its Persian and Sanskrit roots, through European literary adaptations, to its modern scientific prominence, serves as a serendipitous story in its own right 🙂.
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