Serendipity

Got an email this morning from Bryan Quinn talking about serendipity.

I’ve been meaning to look that word up for a while now (you know, what with the movie and all), but didn’t get around to it until now.

Yes, baby, serendipity’s the shit. Before I moved to New York back in ‘99, I went there on a one-week trip for some job interviews, and to try to find a place for us to live. All I got was an offer for a $10/hour internship at a random web shop. But then I started chatting with the waiter at a restaurant where I ate, and he ended up offering us to stay with him and his wife for as long as it would take us to find a place to live.

Just two days after we’d finally arrived together, we’d signed a lease in Brooklyn. And about a month later, Philip popped out of the sky and offered me a job at $100K/year. I had no idea it was gonna go like that, but I just went with the flow.

The cool thing is, you can learn to use serendipity, just like in the tale of the three princes. You don’t have to plan everything out in advance, to cover all eventualities. Just take one step in roughly the right direction each day, and trust that things will work out better than you could have ever planned it. That’s what happened to me in New York.

Didn’t Lennon say “Life’s what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”?