The Engineered Serendipity
Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—you can have it all.
I was standing at a bus stand in Haridwar, India and was supposed to catch a bus for my next destination. I had 2 hours to spare. I looked around and saw a girl my age with her rucksack. Thinking that she is a fellow traveller I went and stood beside her.
I said, “Hello” and she smiled at me. I took that as a cue to continue and started telling her about how I missed my bus, where I am coming from and where I am going.
As I rambled I took a pause and looked sideways at the girl, expecting a response. She sensed my gaze, turned around and pulled out her earbuds and said, “Did you say something to me?”
I smiled and said, “No, nothing.”
I got into the bus and wondered: what if she had heard me? What if we had talked? What would that conversation have looked like? Have we got too disconnected from the world because we choose the world in our pockets instead? Heads down. Headphones in. Blocking the flow of life with all our tech.
But who am I kidding? That thought just lasted for 2 seconds.
My world is surrounded by tech. I have spent a fair share of my life on the internet.
I joined Twitter during the pandemic. Found my first part time job through it. But I was still in college. So when the college re-opened and I was about to resign, the founder asked, “Where’s your college by the way?” Surprisingly, it turned out to be in the same city where the founder and the entire team had set up their office in an apartment.
Basically, my work is on the internet. My tribe of mentors live on the internet. So I am not even remotely tempted to have a cozy apartment in the hills with no internet access, along with a book cafe which brews the world’s best coffee where I get to spend my whole day reading while the book cafe runs on a semi autopilot mode.
See? No, temptation.
Yet, there’s something about the unpredictable nature of life — the chance encounters and happy accidents — that draws me in. It’s the serendipity of life that tempts me.
I find it a little sad that people are losing touch with the physical realm and missing out on the serendipity that the universe has to offer.
During Covid, a loneliness pandemic reared its ugly head and showed the world how alone everyone is in this world of 8 billion people. People experienced the worst phase of loneliness during the pandemic. But even before that, the pandemic of loneliness had already started.
The idea of ‘serendipity’ gives hope to people. That the universe is conspiring in unimaginable ways to make them happy and find love, friendship and companionship.
So it doesn’t surprise me that when the word ‘Serendipity’ was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, it became the most popular word in the UK, surpassing even ‘Jesus’.
Horace was inspired by a fairytale called The Three Princes of Serendip, where the heroes are “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.“
Going further into the etymology, Serendipity comes from Arabic Serendib, which comes from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa: "The Lion's dwelling island" — sounds like the place where the only serendipitous happy accidents will happen for the lions, if a human accidentally lands there.
This idea of stumbling upon something by chance that brings you happiness is at the heart of serendipity.
Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — These are the things we desire and think we stumble upon them by chance. Something that just happens to you.
But as much as chance and serendipity sounds like magic, they can be engineered.
How many times have you heard some variant of - "Spotify is so much better because the recommendations are amazing!"?
That’s an engineered serendipity at play.
xkcd folks always have the best illustrations
Engineered serendipity is partially responsible for the magnetic pull of social media. Every time you scroll just a little further, you might encounter something funny, or enlightening, or inspiring. Or connect with someone important. Or find an unexpected opportunity. So why not keep scrolling?
Much of the serendipity that the internet offers is algorithm generated. When was the last time you searched for something on YouTube and not watched what YouTube recommended you? You might not like the fact that your life is governed by recommendation engines but you sure as hell love the recommendations themselves. That’s why you keep coming back.
So what if we can engineer the same online serendipity in the physical world as well?
Take the Silicon Valley serendipity for example.
The one where, Noah Glass, the founder of Odeo and the guy who thought of the name Twitter sees that Evan Williams who was on the front page of Forbes for selling Blogger to Google is his damn neighbour and he shouts from his balcony, “Hey blogger!”
That was the beginning of their friendship and the first instance of the butterfly effect that led to the creation of Twitter.
Another instance is when Tim Ferris sees a beautiful girl in a coffee shop and starts talking to her, hitting on her, hoping to ask for her number and take her out. And then Naval Ravikant comes in with a huge grin on his face and says, “Oh! I see you have met my girlfriend.”
And this was the beginning of Tim Ferris & Naval Ravikant’s friendship where they now rely on each other for startup advice.
In the online serendipity, ideas take the lead rather than the people. Social channels like Twitter are designed in such a way that in every moment you meet someone new based on the idea they shared. Once an idea sparks on one end and resonates on the other end, and BOOM — You are connected.
The most wonderful online tribes are formed on the basis of ideas.
You are reading a blog and the sub-links take you to another blog and then another blog… the chain reaction leads you to unexpected places.
The serendipity you see on the internet is more of an idea serendipity — The beauty of idea serendipity is that the attraction to the brain happens first.
But in the physical world, it’s the reverse, ideas become secondary to people.
You can take your online communities to the real world to experience what incredible energy in the room feels like. But what more can you do?
How do you become a real-life serendipiter
What if this missing serendipity could be engineered in the physical world and you can become a real-life serendipiter? Someone who has a wide surface area of luck, amazing things just keep happening to you and you meet new people in such a way that it forms a deep connection, making friends and finding companions becomes a cakewalk for you.
Well, there might be some possibilities. Here’s how:
1. Believe you are a noticer
A big part of serendipity is noticing opportunities and ideas as they present themselves to you.
In Dr Sanda Erdelez's words, “You become a super-encounterer, in part because you believe that you are one — it helps to assume that you possess special powers of perception, like an invisible set of antennas, that will lead you to clues.”
Basically, believing that you are a “noticer” leads you to pay more attention which leads you to becoming better at noticing.
2. Read the mistakes
A lot of discoveries we know of, right from Archimedes shouting 'Eureka' in a bathtub and running naked down the street after discovering the principle of buoyancy to the discovery of Penicillin, Microwaves, LSD, X-rays, Viagra and Super Glue happened because of accidents or mistakes.
And a good serendipiter has the ability to recognize the value of an unexpected discovery.
There’s so much potential in unexpected mistakes that I don’t even know the extent of it. Creating a new lingo with your typo mistake is the bare minimum that serendipity can do for you.
Maybe you will end up creating a Time-Space-Dimension machine with your mistake. Who knows?
3. Explore without Exploring
Let’s redefine ‘Exploring’. We all are getting it wrong. We see it as a task, something we do just to gain something from it.
Exploring means having unstructured time to pursue something without a definite metric, goal or definition.
“Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations.”
— Maria Popova The Marginalian
4. Love the unexpected.
Have a sense of curiosity, wonder, and awe at the unknown. Cultivate the ability to make leaps of intuition and cross-connections.
Explore physical spaces. Find the “islands where lions dwell”. This could be best reinforced by travelling.
When changing cities I have lived for months in places I was planning to spend weeks and have spent days in places where the AirBnB was booked for weeks. All because I was guided by my instincts and was always ready to explore new places based on the people I found.
The transition from the stillness and calm of mountain valleys to the early morning traffic of cities to watching the moon flirt with the ocean at night, helps me a lot in my writing as they make me believe in possibilities.
5. Open your heart & accept
Our first instinct as humans is to minimize pain rather than seek out pleasure. Having a mind that’s engineered for serendipity focuses on the latter than the former.
With serendipity, you need to have a high affinity towards acceptance. Everything that happened was the way to go.
Wherever you end up, it's going to be somewhere. Anything is something and anywhere is always somewhere.
6. Smile and say ‘Hello’
Smile and say hello to strangers. Don’t be scared of the small talk. talk about the weather if you want to… connect that to childhood memories of rain and then to parenthood. The connections are endless when you start with one point. There are infinite dots to connect.
Steve Jobs designed Pixar in such a way that people frequently come in contact with each other and TALK.
By its nature, serendipity means both being in the right place at the right time and holding yourself open to interaction.
Instead of reading a book on Kindle. Read a book with the covers visible. Let the world know what you are reading. When Elle Beecher was reading The Surrender Experiment at an airport, a man in his 60s walked up to her and said, “Great book. Wish I had it earlier.”
That sparked a whole conversation about how he went from Harvard MBA to investment banking in NYC… to an existential crisis at 35 where he lost himself, gave it all up, found himself, met his wife, and built multiple businesses.
Elle is the No.1 supporter of planned serendipity. She hosts the Board Walks every Saturday in Austin and hundreds of people join her on foot and walk 10,000 steps. It’s an engineered serendipity because people have life changing conversations with strangers there.
It’s a beautiful world out there, for you to live and explore and be alive. So make the most out of it. Experience the engineered serendipity of both the online and physical realms.
A little side note:
Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — It’s taken from the book A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
‘serendipiter’ was originally coined by the writer Gay Talese
Thank you, Samantha Law, Aleena Vigoda, Hugo Lebarrois, Ashokk N Menon, Barbara Nickless & Jisoo Kim for giving life to this essay.
✍️Weekly Writing Prompt
This week’s writing prompt is from Harrison Moore. (He doesn’t know it but I am stealing it)
❝
Write a list of things you’d like others to write about
Write the names of three interesting people. They could be dead or alive. They could be close friends and family or people you’ll never meet. Just pick people who intrigue you.
Next to each name, write a question you’d like to see them write about. Imagine it’s the one and only opportunity you have to ask them something important. Make it count!
Once you’ve written your questions down, stand back and ask them of yourself. Could you have a go at exploring them?
Let me know how this goes.
📙 One Book Recommendation
Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte has fundamentally changed how I capture ideas and organize them for actionability.
With over 300 notifications a day, we are bombarded with so much information that we are overwhelmed by it. This book helps you create a mental space for your creativity to take root as you are not carrying the mental load of remembering things.
By the end of reading this book, you will have a personal knowledge management system in place that has an organised digital repository of your most valued ideas, notes and creative work.
Thanks for reading till the end! If you have any thoughts to share, I am always here to listen.
Have an awesome week ahead,
Akanksha 🌻