The recipe for serendipity
Reading time: 2 minutes
With annual sales of obesity medication expected to hit $80bn by 2030, Ozempic and weight loss drugs are all the rage right now.
As a result, Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic (and its sibling Wegovy), has become the most valuable company in Europe. Likewise, the value of Eli Lilly, the American maker of Zepbound, a similar weight loss drug, has skyrocketed. Eli Lilly is now one of the most valuable companies in the world and is on track to become the first pharmaceutical company to hit a trillion-dollar market value.
But here’s an interesting fact:
These new obesity drugs were spawned from medication developed to treat type 2 diabetes. The weight loss benefits were a surprising side effect.
In other words, these drugs that are now at the centre of a multi-billion dollar weight loss “space race” were conceived by accident.
Viagra, probably the most well-known drug in the world, was created to treat cardiovascular problems. But during testing, nurses and doctors also discovered a nifty side effect (I’m sure you know what I’m talking about).
In the 1960s, scientist Spencer Silver tried to invent a super-sticky adhesive but ended up making something less sticky but reusable. For years, Silver attempted to find a practical use for his discovery. Only after a colleague used the adhesive to anchor a bookmark in a hymnbook did the idea of using it for paper notes click.
And so, Post-It notes were born.
Instagram was launched as Burbn, a location-based check-in app. When the founders noticed photo sharing was the app's most used feature, they pivoted and relaunched the service as Instagram. E-commerce giant Shopify started as an online snowboarding store called Snowdevil. However, dissatisfied with existing e-commerce platforms, the founders built their own.
After completing university, my brother and I backpacked from Johannesburg to Cairo, and when we returned, we needed to find jobs. At the start of my final interview at Deloitte, the interviewer noted my recent trip and spent almost the entire discussion asking about African travel, with very little asked about my technical suitability for the role. Surprisingly, I got the job. (Side note: the job had nothing to do with African travel).
The moral of the story
The world is random.
⬇️
Doing stuff leads to other stuff - often wildly unexpected and unrelated stuff.
⬇️
Thus, do stuff.
A super important principle - to embrace the randomness as you have described. I think it also goes hand in hand with letting time pass (i.e. so that the randomness has space to occur). https://zantafakari.substack.com/p/let-time-do-its-thing?r=p7wqp