There is an inexorable rule that governs our actions, or at least mine: I never find what I’m looking for, I always find what I was looking for a few months ago. What I am looking for today will appear tomorrow, but in the meantime, what I already considered lost forever appears, in the land of the dead. I am referring above all to books, which is what I look for the most, but the same thing happens to me with other things: shoes, shirts, pants. It is a variant of serendipity applied not to scientific discoveries but to daily life. Almost all scientific discoveries occur by chance, that is why it is connected with my own experience: in my (our) way, serendipity is present, elusive, it is that daily frustration that in the end becomes a prize; an anachronistic award, but an award.
I could write a long list of important discoveries made by chance, from the law of gravity to Viagra, passing through penicillin, but until today it would not have occurred to me to include among the fortuitous discoveries that of a fitness discipline, which I do not practice. In an interview with the BBC, the Colombian dancer and choreographer Alberto Pérez told how he invented zumba, a “fun and easy” way of doing gymnastics, which makes an activity, generally tedious and boring, look like a party, and which is practice to the rhythm of Latin American pop music. Today Zumba is a worldwide phenomenon, but it was invented by chance, and it is estimated that fifteen million people practice it every day in at least 180 countries.
Pérez was born in 1970 in Cali and began working at the age of 14 to support his family, after his mother was accidentally shot by a police officer who was chasing a thief. He was a bricklayer and ice cream maker, among other things, until he found a job as an aerobics instructor. When his mother recovered, the whole family moved to the United States, but he stayed in Colombia to try his hand at dance. But to support himself he had to continue giving aerobics classes, which he did to the rhythm of American music, using songs by Madonna and Michael Jackson. But one day he forgot at home the cassette that he used to use, and in order not to postpone the lesson he decided to try something else: he took a cassette from the car with a compilation of rumba, salsa and merengue that he had recorded from the radio and improvised. He told his students that he had thought of innovating a bit and invented aerobic steps to the rhythm of the songs he was listening to. The thing liked a lot, so he decided to continue.
The phenomenon grew, helped by word of mouth. A lot of new people began to arrive, queuing at the gym door to enter. That was the beginning of the zumba, which at that time was called “rumba”. In the 1990s, Pérez moved to Bogotá, where he continued to gain fame. Shakira hired him to devise choreographies for the video clips of her songs. And then everything got out of hand.
In 2001, Pérez moved to Miami, and there, with two friends, he founded Zumba Fitness, a company that today is estimated to cost several hundred million dollars.
In addition to fortuitous finds, I am amazed by the stories of those who manage to twist the course of fate by chance. I will be told that Alberto Pérez sweated a lot to achieve success, and that is undeniable, but it is also undeniable that many sweat more than him without getting anything in return. From where it derives that the rule for success does not exist, that it depends on chance, and that in the end everything we can expect from life is subject to a change of pace. Which, expanding the reasoning, is what led to success not only for Pérez, but also for Newton and Fleming.
You may also like