Serendipity is the occurrence of valuable or pleasant discoveries by chance, often described as a “happy accident” or fortunate luck. It represents finding something wonderful without looking for it, such as accidental scientific breakthroughs or chance encounters that lead to highly positive outcomes.
SERENDIPITOUSLY STUMBLING ON DEEPLY ENERGISED EUPHORIC FOCUS
Let’s say you have a problem and you really want the solution. And here’s what you think the solution is. But many times you are wrong about that answer, and without ever knowing why.
How?
This happens when you lack the necessary skills, knowledge and experience to understand what falls outside your ability. And it’s easy to feel sure about yourself when you already think you know. Much harder is it to admit knowing far less than we like to think we do. And this matter can be complicated further by the fact that quite possible is it to think we know it all, when in fact those who think that are the closest to knowing nothing.
However, you do need to start from somewhere in order to get anywhere. And better to want something somewhere than nothing nowhere. So having a problem that you feel needs solved is much better than having no reason to care in order to try and learn for the purpose of solving something.
So we deliberately create difficult problems to solve for their own sake that are way beyond our reach in order to try and pull ourselves up to the level of our ideas. And so, even the problem of trying to think which is the best and most hardest problem to solve is itself a difficult problem to solve before even beginning to search for anything. As you have the problem of creating the wrong problem to solve. You want to make sure you have a good problem. But how can you tell which problems are bad problems when you’re also convinced this is a good problem?
And that is a serious problem.
So the problem of coming up with and creating better problems is a process to itself that doesn’t just generate the best ideas. They mature over time. And need lots of time to do so. How much time? As long as they need is the answer. Many of my books, including this one is the culmination of 30-years of psychological research. So as a ballpark figure estimate, let’s say to start you with 30-years as a possibility.
And so you need to be able to create lots of ideas so you can differentiate later between them all in order to know which are still good or others that have gone stale, which is great news to know, so you never launched that dud. Continuous research and never ending study will only increase the complexity of your thought, which takes time, experience and a significant amount of physical and mental energy invested to these tasks for elevating your thinking.
Also, creating puzzles for the sake of confusing ourselves in order that we may be able to spot better patterns and relationships between unrelated things in unnoticeable places is fun for its own sake. And in doing so, that will lead you to far better creative insights.
So you head off in the direction you think you need to go, going after what it is you think you need. And while, yes, there are many things you need, but your limited education and lack of awareness constrains your ability which also restricts your foresight, meaning you are unable to know what other possible solutions there could be. So even if you were to hear about it now, there’s also the possibility that you aren’t listening and therefore won’t understand how to use the solution even whenever it’s staring right at you.
The more you engage with the task, however, that dedication, that desire, and a commitment of ‘must learn to know’ attitude and mindset, increases your probability of being in the right place, at the right time, and perhaps the only moment in time possible that can lead you to the accidental discovery of the best happy accident. You had no idea about any of this prior to it, and you would never have gone looking for it, as you never knew it existed until after the search. And that process ignites many new discoveries.
So having a problem that needs solved in your mind starts this process of then wanting to go and look for its solution. And it is that that opens the doors of possibility, the chance for you to stumble into a serendipitous moment whereby you just happen to appear to be caught randomly inside something, by pure unintended chance that now catapults you forward seemingly out of nowhere, all the while the conscious awareness of it may still be months, even years away from being realised.
And that turns out to be the most amazing thing, and the solution you never went looking for was the best possible answer you could have never hoped to find. And it was that discovery that led to better than what you thought you were hoping to find.
For if you found what you went looking for, you may have missed the point. So what this means to say is:
NOTHING COMES FROM NOWHERE
When you actively search and you are also desperate to find, that feeling of desperation may be the first ingredient in order to trigger deep inspiration. Because if you are not desperate to learn, if you do not seek to lift yourself out of failure, then unfortunately, you probably never will. And if you have that learned helplessness mindset or attitude to your life then everything in your life is going to be shit. And, you’ll deserve that. There is no one better to lift themselves out of their predicament than you. There’s also no reason why anyone else should.
Take responsibility and ownership of your own life. You don’t like how hard things are? Well then you better start getting used to hard things. Because what if it stays hard? In that case, your fucked. So we’re going to need to flip that attitude. I’m going to need you to run towards difficulty. Then, I’m going to need you to enjoy it. And it can be enjoyed, once you know this trick.
Pay close attention and do exactly as you are told, follow the instructions, and don’t be afraid of seeming too involved here, as you might just learn more than any other person in the room that day. And if you manage to do that, serendipity could just happen.
But if you never go to the places to learn from the right faces who do know, or don’t make the effort to try and know, or worse, think you already know, then you may never understand and will also then never experience.
The one thing that makes everything else possible. It all starts with being the most interested person in the room. Don’t ever forget to record everything. You have a microphone in your pocket everywhere you go. And your memory won’t be able to recall everything you ever hear being said. So don’t miss anything. Always record everything. What doesn’t make sense in the present may just add up a to be the most precious achievement of your future and discovery of your whole life.
Which is why these two books deserve a seat at the very top of my library pyramid deliberately placed like two sides of an equilateral triangle and the face to complete the third side is:
Entirely up to you.
Here’s some notes I took inside this book 9-years ago now. And I seem to have wrote a note to myself asking, what is the creative process? And then proceeded to search for discovering its answer, by engaging with the activities that bring about its experience.
Ask me that question now today though, what is the creative process? In it simplest form: one of the most exhilarating experiences of your life. Not only does it feel better than sex and drugs, it will even keep you off both. As the night gives way to the day, and you somehow haven’t noticed.
That’s pure transcendental flow.
Sex reaches its climax then comes to an abrupt end. And if you don’t know what to do with yourself after it, boredom will more than likely start to set in again. Even drugs start to bring on downers after the high is finished. Not to mention that drugs is also bad for your health and rarely, if ever, after an evening of hysteric laughter leads to improvement of the self.
But the creative process?
Flow not only never comes with any downers after, but it always only comes after with uppers and leads to qualitatively positive changes to the neurochemistry of your brain. Meaning, the feeling derived from the creative process, once entered, goes on and on and on and on and on. Time will vanish. The ego disappears. And for the duration the person will be teleported to an altered state of consciousness where the boundaries of everyday life and reality are temporarily suspended. Then once you return and bounce back from that episode, the self paradoxically expands and grows itself during these acts of self-forgetfulness, returning much stronger than it was before, literally changing ‘you’ in the process.
But this kind of experience doesn’t come easy. Indeed, the only way for it to keep coming is to ensure everything is always anything, but easy.
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME: ONE IDEA CAN BE ALL IT TAKES TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
Music for flow today:
Why boyband music? I have always had a guilty pleasure that nobody but my wife knows about: I really, really love boybands. And this song right here is a classic for cooling down after a flow state session workout. Enjoy!