Summer Sunshine
It's been a beat.
Hello all! How is it already AUGUST? It’s been a beat since Creative Collisions landed in your inbox.
Our last article was in June: “Future Casting AI Tools for Creatives, How to Face an Unknown Future,” by the brilliant Henry Lee. Since then, we’ve been taking our own advice, we’ve been experiencing, and we’ve been giving our mind and body space to explore.
I, personally, have also been diving into the fascinating world of serendipity. It is a wild—and amazing, inspiring, empowering, and enabling practice. I believe serendipity is the flywheel that will allow us to create ongoing and sustainable value in this crazy, volatile, and uncertain world.
Serendipity is not luck, coincidence, or accident.
Serendipity occurs when an individual, who is actively or passively seeking, encounters the unexpected, unanticipated, or new, makes a novel connection, and takes action to pursue it. As a result of their pursuit, new value is created.
It is a generative practice—the result of intentional mindsets and behaviors combined with varied inputs and conditions that enable novel invention, groundbreaking innovation, and personal clarity.
It is the big unlock. But don’t take my word for it, check out the great serendipity stories I’ve been sharing at a sibling publication, Practicing Serendipitist. Examples such as Penicillin, DNA, Graza Olive Oil, Nike’s waffle-soled shoes, Cotopaxi, and Lemonada Media.
As I continue to evolve this practice and bring it to more people and more organizations, Creative Collisions as a substack will enter a period of temporary hibernation. Not gone forever, but taking a few months off. (If you’re a paid subscriber, you may have already been notified that your subscription will be paused.) For those of you in Minneapolis, however, we’ll keep our in-person Creative Collisions meet-ups. (If you’re local and not on the list, HMU and we’ll get you added.)
If you’d like to follow along with my work on serendipity and see if it might be a new and powerful tool for you, you can find more information here:
Before we begin our rest…
I leave you with a few interesting interviews with Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, on Cloudflare’s efforts around AI. He frames a new era of the internet and looks at where Cloudflare might fit into it. I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought that they might have such a big role, but in many ways, it’s a no-brainer. They protect nearly 25% of everything on the internet, sitting between you and the content. A few key insights I took away:
If there’s no way to monetise content, then it will cease being created, and then the internet and AI will die. AI requires creators
There’s a market for valuable content. Prince uses the analogy of Swiss cheese, ‘...if someone can fill a hole, there will always be a market for what they create…’
The internet needs a new business model. In this new era, it can’t be traffic.
You can listen to a couple of interviews here:
Thanks for being part of our journey so far. We look forward to continuing to grow together in the future.
As a reminder, if you’d like to follow along with my work on serendipity and see if it might be a new and powerful tool for you, you can find more information here: