the physics behind synthesizing serendipity
thoughts while free-falling through life
Exactly four months ago, I was by the Chatahoochee River on a silent retreat. That weekend, life slowed to near zero– for two days, I wasn’t exposed to the artificial urgency of the digital world– I was just walking through acres of nature and writing, with only my own mind as social entertainment.
I returned to civilization on a Sunday. That Monday, something or someone dropped a boulder on the gas pedal. Life took off in that Tom & Jerry way where Tom stretches and launches like a slingshot.
I think the saying is that life got flipped turned upside down — but that doesn’t cover the half of it. The upside down moved me to San Francisco. The inside out quit my job immediately after graduation. The backwards started a startup.
But when everything was (is) up in the air, life did its funny life thing and began offering us moments of faith, fleeting like a snowflake on your palm.
Meeting * just * the right person, having * just * the right conversation at * just * the right time to move us in the right direction.
What felt like magic became reliably reproducible when aggregated over time. I started wondering how much of serendipity is actually due to luck at all. Or if maybe there’s a way to move through the world that makes puzzle pieces more likely to just “fall” into place.
patching the holes in the bucket
Depending on how you define the term “work”, it can seem like I’m working 12 hours a day these days. The optics don’t help, because you’ll find me at my desk on my laptop for that many hours a day, engaging in an activity that has all the archetypal features of “work”.
What 12 hours of “work” every day for three months has shown me is that the optics tell the wrong story.
Friction as a concept in physics always frustrated me. Matter is never created nor destroyed, but 90% of the energy I expend can be “dissipated into the surroundings”. Why should “the surroundings” get all our energy?
Progress has an upper bound equal to the effort we put in. But I think we severely underestimate how much the ceiling is lowered when we introduce friction and move through life performing actions that don’t really align with our personal incentives.
When I was working a corporate job, I spent 8 hours per day in fundamental misalignment. I kept pouring heavy-handed into a leaky bucket, and was inevitably always left with the same minuscule amount of water that accrued around the holes.
Since I’ve fell in love with building, working on projects was grouped in the same bucket as working out, hanging out with friends, and writing. Now, that’s the same bucket building a startup is in.
(I’m a productivity freak, so all my dopamine circuits are lighting up with the thought that every minute I spend directly compounds toward something I actually give a shit about.)
Aligning the movement and shape of my life to my incentives feels like a state of perfect equilibrium– everything I pour in directly quenches my own prosperity.
the magic of throwing shit at the wall
First principles thinking is a concept used heavily in the startup world. It attempts to distill the infinite things that have to “go right” for a startup to be successful into a pocket compass that can guide you only 10 feet forward at a time, anchored in a few universal truths that have historically built great products.
Perhaps the simplest universal first principle is movement (spray and pray 🤞). Those who are dynamic don’t have to await serendipity — they just stumble around like a drunk at a party, making it impossible for luck not to bump into them.
A big mental unlock I recently stumbled upon was that we all have the ability to just do shit. Not once we achieved clarity, and not once we had a plan, but always now.
Investor meetings, cold outbound, number of iterations until product-market fit (sorry for the startup jargon). Almost everything becomes reliable in large quantities of just being out in the world and doing stuff. My cofounder and I have started using the phrase “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” almost daily now.
Although movement alone is not a sufficient condition for success, it is a necessary one. Luck is not a proportion of favorable outcomes out of outcomes experienced. The million acts where life was a complete shitshow seem to slip from memory when a breathtaking number comes on.
dancing with serendipity
A wise friend of mine once told me that we’re all just big ol’ electrons: it’s impossible to know both our velocity and our position at the same time.
Right now, my velocity is the highest it’s been in my life, so I guess that means I have no fucking clue where I am (did Heisenberg ever mention acceleration? Because even velocity feels like a blur these days.)
With motion in constant acceleration, you still control the force applied. Chaos is several derivatives past this. For something to “fall” into place, that implies it must’ve been up in the air with some degree of chaos. I’m now convinced that it is only at this derivative that there is enough movement for serendipity to pay attention.
Serendipity favors those who are aligned, not those in control. Control is a way to reject uncertainty, but without any fog or dust in the air, laser beams are invisible.
So maybe I don’t really need to know my velocity or my position for a while.
so here we go…
People kill, cheat, and lie for power over others.
But the kind of power I’ve come to admire—the kind that radiates throughout a room—is power over your own motion. The ability to move with intention. To keep going even when the path is blurry. To be so loud that luck physically cannot avoid you.
Somewhere along the past four months—through a string of beautifully serendipitous events—I stopped leaking energy, found my rhythm, and made peace with the unknown. And that’s when serendipity started showing up.
And while I feel like we’re learning to hack it, there’s still something so beautifully romantic and mysterious about unintended symmetries.
I’m about to turn 22, so it seems like an appropriate time to send my thank you to the world for the serendipity of life that brought me here. I wouldn’t change a thing <3