The Benefits of Wandering

Science is often presented as being a very linear process: follow a hypothetical, run experiments, and draw conclusions.

A look at the history, however, shows that a lot of the big scientific discoveries followed a more circuitous route:

Start something with a theory. Wander and get lost. Discover something else along the way.

This is a quality that is often a signature of Pisces.

On an episode of The Astrology Podcast, astrologer Austin Coppock (who was born with the Sun in Pisces) summed it up this way:

I dreamed it, and then I did the math, and it checked out.

Pisces likes to dream. It wanders, meanders, and often gets lost, but eventually it finds its way.

Albert Einstein was a Pisces sun with his midheaven — the point that signals public roles and career) in Pisces. Einstein’s big discoveries followed this Piscean trajectory of I dreamed it, then I did the math, and it checked out.

History is replete with examples of scientific breakthroughs and innovative discoveries that happened by accident.

Wandering and getting lost get a bad rap, but sometimes that’s exactly what we need to discover our next big breakthrough idea.

Innovation is most often the result of necessity. It’s rarely the result of detailed planning.

Big companies are slowly learning the importance of giving employees latitude to wander, explore areas outside of their main roles, and work on projects that may not necessarily have a clear relationship to their core functions.

Solopreneurs, feeling the pressure to produce constantly, often work harder than employees of companies. We might feel we have more riding on us. As a result, we might give ourselves a hard time for deviating from the main goal of our work.

That’s a big mistake.

We need these pursuits — not as “side hustles” with the pressure to turn them into revenue streams — but as mini-detours that help spark our imagination and creative solutions to the main problems we are here to solve.

The solutions we seek are rarely found in the silo of the problem. They are most often found when we allow ourselves to wander and stay open to what we might discover.