What is Serendipity?
Ask this question to google and it tells you the following “The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.”
Ask this question to an overworked businessperson and they might tell you, there is no such thing. Ask it to a joyful child, they will laugh back at you and that would be your answer.
So I ask myself this question, and I am somewhere in between working really hard for a positive event to happen to me, and also laughing at the hilarity of the possibility of controlling life in any way.
Serendipity becomes real when we learn to live in a careful balance between doing what must be done gently and without force or resistance.
Force life to go in a certain direction and face the consequence of life’s love for probability and NOT giving you what you wanted just because you “worked really hard for it”. Losing is an enormous part of life, except we choose to completely dismiss it from existence and by only focusing on the winning strategies, winning people, teams and ideas we delude ourselves into a wrong mental state. We start thinking that doing what someone else has done to the detail will land us the same result; and that’s almost never how life works. The losing ones had at some point similar chances as those who eventually won. So the idea is not to favor one consequence over the other. The idea is to learn and become good, become humble and eloquent in the language of serendipitous life.
Many have achieved so much and when asked about it they say that they have no idea why they made it and the others didn’t. Obviously one major book that tries to address this is Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. The book dives into the personal lives of the “successful” ones and tries to pin point one major commonality of years of practice, or age, or physical build, many of which are factors outside of our control.
Except there is one huge trick to unlocking our own mental barriers regardless of physical strength, education or economic situation. Serendipitous flow is that feeling of being totally immersed in an experience that goes beyond your effort and doubts. It is a total merger between our attention and our action. It feels like you are being operated by an outer force; it is complete let go. An orgasm of human functioning- I hope that’s a good description! This tends to happen when we are really happy, we feel like we are in trance; but what if we can switch that into something that makes us work better?
So, I hear you ask, how do we take ourselves to Serendipitous flow in an activity?
You must first be quiet, being really silent is the only way to begin.
Then you must observe how said activity is done.
Third, you must give attention to each factor and not dismiss something as easy or unimportant.
Fourth comes a good one, practice the activity you want to become good at. That is all that is needed to say, PRACTICE. Thank you Mr Gladwell for proving that.
Fifth is the most difficult part to some, and the most put aside step, and that is remaining calm. Remaining calm entails an action of steadiness in your step. It means ZERO FORCE and ZERO RESISTANCE, those two actions or non-actions help your mind into the state of serendipitous flow.
Serendipitous flow is the magic trick, the golden card for living, and although it sounds like a flashy trend, it actually is what separates a Jedi or a Ninja from regular office working 9 to 5 living homo sapiens.
So who do you want to become?
Uplifting Letters 