Doing vs. Thinking and Serendipity

I'm cleaning out all of the stories I've clipped in the past few weeks, and there were a couple of gems from The Occupational Adventure. This one pulled out a great quote from a book talking about minimizing the intellectual exercise of planning and deciding in favour of actually getting out there and doing stuff as a way to figure out your path:

"We learn who we are - in practice, not in theory - by testing reality, not by looking inside. We discover the true possibilities by doing - trying out new activities, reaching out to new groups, finding new role models, and reworking our story as we tell it to those around us. What we want clarifies with experience and validation from others along the way.
...To launch ourselves anew, we need to get out of our heads. We need to act."

The second one I wanted to keep was Curt's better definition of serendipty, using some advice from a photographer: "Some photographers call it serendipity. I call it being at the right place enough times to give the right time a chance of happening." It's related to the first point because of the focus on doing rather than planning or waiting for the perfect something. I found a similar phenomenon when we used to live beside Value Village (great new tagline: "The Ultimate Treasure Hunt"). If you want to find the coolest items, you don't go there once a month for three hours...you go a couple of times a week for fifteen minutes, preferably after they've put out some new stuff.