Serendipity is one of my favorite words. If you simplify it, it translates to a beautiful accident. I first learnt about this word back in 2015, when I stumbled upon a movie while trying to make sense of a broken heart. Some 11 years later, I have been thinking about this word a lot.
When I look back, I notice that all the life-changing and meaningful things that have happened in my life have been because of serendipity. I didn't even know what I was doing, to be honest. I just know I was there somewhere. I found myself at a place where life was about to happen in front of me. Right place, at the right time.

I have been thinking about that too. There is so much pressure on oneself to be at the right place at the right time now, more than ever. In hopes of finding love, a job, a moment in time when the mysteries of life just open up to you. But over the last few weeks, my realization has been about something else altogether. Perhaps the fight that needs to be is not that of finding ourselves in the right place at the right time, but rather, increasing the surface area for serendipity to happen.

So I guess the question is this. How do you, if ever, find a way to increase the surface area for serendipity?

I think these are moments. Tiny ones at that. Where you are just raising your hand to do something you haven't done before. Looking at a notice board. Maybe taking a new turn on a street. Asking a stranger a question about their world that you know nothing about. Or just taking a tiny action towards the unknown, especially one that is not comfortable.

The question has always been the same for me: when I am standing at a fork and one path is comfortable and the other is unknown, which one has a better story on the other side of it?

I remember always raising my hand back in school, especially when I didn't know what may happen on the other side of it. Often I had no skills, but I just knew I wanted to learn.

I had no idea what it means to debate. I grew up musically talented, but overall quite introverted. Since there was no one else who raised their hand, I found myself totally bombing on the main stage at a debate competition. And through that, someone told me there is this school senior, Dimple didi, that I should reach out to. She knows, somehow, to tell the stories that matter. I found myself at her home, telling her I know nothing about what it means to debate. All I knew was that I had to mug things up and vomit them on stage. She taught me what it means to tell a story from a place of living it. Taking an audience through that journey. And 20 years since that day, I am still telling all my stories that way.

Back in college, I registered for a robotics workshop, something completely new to me. After the workshop, I just ended up going to speak with the founder saying, I don't really know what I might be able to do to help, but I know I want to. That led to my first internship, where I learnt everything I knew about electronics, prototyping, writing code, and figuring out what it would take to take an idea or a feeling to the real world.

A mentor reached out to ask, do you want to write a book? I didn't know the first thing about what that meant. Said yes, and also told her that I just wanted to help. That translated to my first book, Arduino for Kids.

I saw a notice on the notice board in 2013. It said something about an MIT Design Innovation Workshop. Applied, not knowing if I would get in, somehow got selected for it. That experience taught me everything I know today about finding problem statements in the world, articulating them, and eventually building something from them.

And now, I find myself in a job where my work literally is to ask questions and bring forward the unseen and unknown part of problem statements that just never show up, unless you are willing to sit with uncomfortable questions with the person on the other side of the product.

So much has happened and continues to happen because of serendipity. Because of asking the question, how can I help, and doing things mostly for the story on the other side of it.

I don't really know where all of this comes from, but I must say, my parents have played a big part in it. I remember this vividly, a conversation that happened when I had to choose whether to stay close to my hometown or move 3000 kilometers away to Bangalore for college.

My father just said this: there are thousands of companies in Bangalore. Just going there, being in that environment, will change you in ways we can't imagine. And after all, all you need is one job after college. If you are just there, something may show up.

And that one decision, of increasing the surface area for serendipity, changed the course of my life.

I notice that the things I have built or been part of that matter most always started with a conversation I wasn't planning to have, or a world I knew nothing about. The tools to build keep getting simpler, now more than ever. But the hard part was never the building. It was finding the thing worth building, and that only ever came from being somewhere I hadn't been before, with people I hadn't met before, asking them questions about their worlds in order to learn and discover things they might know inherently but don't have the ability to articulate for themselves.

If you are curious about what would help you find what's next, perhaps all you have to do is increase your surface area for serendipity.
Do things for the story.
Take a long trip from Bangalore to Chennai via Kanchipuram with someone you just met and become the closest of friends.
Share a ride with an office colleague and find yourself being the best man at his wedding a few years later.
Or a stranger says hi in a shared hostel, and a few years later, you are giving a toast at his wedding in Udaipur.
Call a few folks for a coffee and walk away with a best friend whose entire family adopts you in a few months.
Or dream of a carpet and find it hanging in a lane in Marrakech five weeks later.

Perhaps plans and planning are the absolute opposite of what it takes to increase the surface area for serendipity. Or maybe, serendipity will always find a way to happen. You just have to be open for life to show you directions where a story is meant to happen, and you do that. Grab the opportunity, do it for the story, and before you know it, you are on my side of the screen, writing about serendipity too, while listening to a kirtan at Dolores Park.

Life is waiting for you to be open. All things beautiful and meaningful are right around the corner, just in the opposite direction of what you have planned for. And I hope you find me there too.

To increasing the surface area for serendipity.

Love,
Rishi