The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 203 - Serendipity

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, listeners. We are stopping by with a very quick and very exciting update before this week's episode, and that is that there'll be a live recording of The Long and The Short Of It podcast in New York City on Monday, the 22nd of August, at 6pm Eastern. Jen, what are the details?

Jen: If you are in the New York area and you'd like to be a guest for this live taping, head on over to thelongandtheshortpodcast.com/live, and you'll find the registration form there. But hurry up, because space is extremely limited. So head on over there, register, and we'll see you in New York City. And now, on to this week's episode.

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: I posted a video on Instagram today.

Pete: Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Something's happened. Something big must have happened, I'm guessing.

Jen: I have been silent on Instagram for a long time, but I had this experience today that I felt I needed to document and share, and I want to talk to you about it and get your take on it. In a nutshell, I took a new path.

Pete: Great. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Okay, so here's what happened. I'm on the island of Nantucket right now, and I was riding my bike on a street that I ride my bike on all the time. And I noticed to my right, that there was like a new wooden elevated out of the marsh path.

Pete: Like a boardwalk?

Jen: Like a boardwalk. Like a boardwalk, yeah.

Pete: Nice, nice. I love a good boardwalk.

Jen: And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." And then, I kept biking. And I was like, "What? Jen, turn around and go see what that is. There is a new path on your path." So I turned the bike around, I parked the bike, and I step onto this wooden boardwalk-y thing. And I realized, I'm like walking into the marsh. And it just keeps going and going and going. And then suddenly, I'm in the middle of this unbelievable nature preserve. And it's like spectacular. And there are wild blackberries growing. And there are deer. And it was just like so amazing. And I was like, "Oh my gosh. I'm a walking metaphor right now, for taking a new path. Let me pull out my phone and talk to my phone. And if I get anything good, maybe I'll share it." So I'm walking and talking, Pete. And as I'm talking about taking a new path, I turn a corner, and there's another one...another one of these wooden things. And I was like, "Oh my gosh. I can't believe this is happening." So, I get on that path. And then, there's another one. And then, there's a crossroads. And that's where the video ended, but I kept walking. So I took one of the roads on the crossroads path, and I ended up in a field with frickin' horses. It was like something out of a dream. It was like a magical moment. And I was talking about this in the video (which I'll share in the Box O' Goodies), I could have just as easily said, on my bike, "I know what path I'm on. I know my way home. Just go home. Like, go where you think you're going." And that was my initial impulse. And I had to actually consciously make the decision to turn the bike around and go see this new thing. And, uh, I know that the possibilities for mixing metaphors here are endless, so have at it, Shepherd.

Pete: Have at it with the mixed metaphors...let's go. So, I love this story. You know, the first thing that comes to mind is when I first met you during the altMBA, and you said something in our cohort about why you love New York so much.

Jen: Mmm. Yep.

Pete: And as I recall it, the paraphrase version was that you love how much serendipity there is in a place like New York.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: And so, that's the first place my mind went. Where like, this feels like a lesson for or a case for serendipity.

Jen: It's so true. I mean, yes, one of the things I love about living in New York...and okay, I'm starting to connect some dots here. You know, I get on the same train to go to work every day. I get on at 103rd and I get off at 28th Street, but the players are always different. It's kind of like doing theater, where you stand in the same place and you say the same lines, but the audience is different so you just never know what you're going to get. And I love that. I love never knowing what I'm going to get. And yet today, my impulse was trying to tell me to just do the normal thing.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: So I almost robbed myself of this magical horse in a field moment.

Pete: Gosh. Are you sure it wasn't a unicorn?

Jen: It was two horses and either two like mini-horses or two donkeys...I'm not a horse person enough to know what I was looking at.

Pete: Great, they were four-legged animals. So I think the reason I brought up serendipity is because it's actually something I've been thinking a lot about recently, in terms of how I might make space for it. I have enough knowledge of the fact that serendipity is a good thing to warrant me wanting to put more of it into my life, and I've been thinking about how I might do that a lot recently. So I guess a specific example, I'm coming to the States in August, spending some time in Chicago and I'm spending some time in New York, and the natural thing for me to do or has been, "Okay, Pete. You've got two weeks. Don't want to waste a day. Make sure you connect with and meet with as many people as possible. Spend a bunch of time with Jen, we've got a bunch of things we want to do." And like, I could very easily schedule the entire thing. And then I have this like other voice in the back of my head, which is like, "And you've got to leave room for serendipity." Because at some point, there'll be a coffee with a person that I didn't expect that I would have a coffee with, and they'll say something, and that will link back to like everything that will make the entire trip worthwhile. Like, I just know...I feel like I've traveled enough to know that in any given experience, there's this random serendipitous moment that you can't plan for.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And so, I'm thinking about like, how do I build in...it's sort of, it's weird. How do you intentionally create serendipity or leave space for serendipity within a two week travel schedule? But then I think the extension of that, which I'm thinking is related to your metaphor, is, how do we like interrupt our own patterns, our own days, and give room for serendipity like that?

Jen: I love this conversation so much. It reminds me of, we were...gosh, I wish I could remember which episode it was. I'm sure we've talked about it on more than one. But the idea of, when we see open space, we have this tendency to want to fill it or to say yes to anything. And then, as we get closer to the date that we said yes to this thing we didn't really want to do or this coffee date or this event, but we had the space, then something else, something "better" comes along, and we're like, "No! Why did I say yes to all of these things? Now, I don't have room for the thing I really want." And I think what you're speaking to is so smart, the idea of not only leaving room for serendipity, but like expecting it.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Expect serendipity, so leave space for it to come in.

Pete: Ooh, I like that. Expect serendipity. So that now reminds me of another metaphor...here we are with the metaphors...that my brilliant friend, Michelle Florendo, introduced me to a few months ago. I wrote a blog post about it, I'll put it in the Box O' Goodies. But I mean, we were talking about this, essentially. Is like, how do you know which opportunities to say yes to and which opportunities to say no to? And I was sort of sharing with her how it can easily, in my mind, you can easily get stuck in this fear of scarcity, that, "There won't be any other opportunity, so you have to plan this one and take advantage of this one and say yes to this thing, because I don't know what's going to happen in the future." And so she introduced me to this metaphor, which I really love, which was kind of like that life or business is a bit like tennis practice. And if you imagine on one side of the tennis net, there is a tennis ball machine which is just constantly and persistently firing one ball after another ball after another ball at you. And in this metaphor, those balls represent opportunities. And so, she was saying, you know, some of them, you see it perfectly, your eyes light up and you hit a perfect forehand return over the net. And it's like, "Wow, that felt amazing." And then, other opportunities you like completely shank and you hit the wrong side of the racket, or you swing and you miss all together, or you're facing the wrong way and it hits you in the back of the head, or you're facing the right way and it hits you in the front of the head. And that, always, there is this like steady stream of opportunities that are going to present themselves. And so, I found that a really helpful way to get over or tackle scarcity mindset.

Jen: Mmm-hmm.

Pete: Thinking there's only one tennis ball, and actually remembering like, "There's plenty of tennis balls. You've just got to give yourself space, and expect," like you said, "expect the serendipity of another one coming."

Jen: You know, another element today that I think was an important ingredient in having this magical horses in a field moment, was noticing. We did an episode once called Pay Attention.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jen: And I've shared this on many platforms, that one of my greatest mentors taught me those two words, "pay attention". And that, I was paying attention...and I was ready to ignore what I was paying attention to. But it was an important reminder that I could have just been riding on my bike in autopilot, not really trying to take in the surroundings. I had had a particularly challenging experience earlier in the day, which is why I went for the bike ride in the first place. I wanted to like feel the sun on my face and smell the flowers and like, so I was actively engaging with the environment which is why I even noticed this thing. But it feels like there are all these different elements that had to come together. First of all, I needed to get on the bike. But then, intentionally opening myself up to the environment. And then, ultimately, following the new path.

Pete: I love that. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like an exercise in mindfulness for you. You literally decided to go and seek mindful time by riding a bike and taking it all in like that. I guess there's also a tie in to this idea that we've talked about before too, with attachment to an outcome. Where, so often we can be attached to an outcome that we put the blinders on and fail to see the new path or the other path, or we define success by that outcome. And so, if your outcome was to get to the place that you always ride, and you saw a path, you know, you could spin up an argument that, "Oh, that's not success if I go down that path, because I've defined that success is this path over here." And then, you miss this magical moment. And like, gosh, I feel...I can feel like a visceral reaction to myself, of, how many times have you defined success by this end destination and then missed things along the way as a result?

Jen: Yeah. Oh, that's such a good point. Because it is so easy to marry these desired outcomes. But leaving room for expecting serendipity helps with that detachment process.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and this idea of trusting that process. Actually, I wrote at the top of my to do list this week, "Trust the process."

Jen: Ah, I love that.

Pete: Yeah. I recognize I've been too attached to an outcome, like, "When I get to Chicago or when I get to New York, I'll do this, this, and this." And I've been trying to remind myself, literally by writing down "Trust the process", that, you know, the bit between now and when I actually get there, the planning, the serendipity that might happen in the conversations that you and I are going to have over the next two weeks to set up what might be a fun event, like I need to stay open and trust that process as well, and not just think about the outcome.

Jen: I really love that, which is making me connect some new dots. So, here's what I thought was going to happen after I recorded this video.

Pete: Yes.

Jen: I was going to upload it to Instagram and move on with my life. But then I realized, because I don't really use Instagram that much, I didn't really know how to upload a video that long. So I had to do a little Google searching, of like, "How do I actually upload a three minute video to my story? Huh. Okay." So, I figured that out. And then I thought, "Okay. I'm just going to post it there, and maybe someone will see it and it'll be sort of a fun thing, and then it'll disappear in twenty four hours." So, I expected that to be the outcome. And for myself, it felt a bit like a win, just getting back on that platform after a while. But what ended up happening, Pete, is...it's been up for, at this point, maybe it's only been up for like four hours. At least forty people have sent me private messages.

Pete: Oh, whoa.

Jen: Saying, "You have no idea how much I needed that today," or, "This completely changed how I'm approaching my day today," or, "Experiencing that, as it was happening, was a reminder to go do something different for myself." Like, all of these people reached out to me. And so now, I'm like, "Huh. I think I actually have to turn it into a main page post, so it can stay up there. Because twenty four hours from now, maybe I'll still want it to live there," which is not what I had expected. It was such a casual moment. I figured, "Post it, and twenty four hours later, it'll be gone." But now, I'm like, "Oh, maybe there's an outcome that I didn't expect. Which is, people are inspired by watching someone make a new choice."

Pete: Well, that's super interesting and meta, because the video itself has become a new path for the people that have discovered it.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: They might have been doing the thing that they're used to doing, which is, "I'll hop on Instagram, and I'll scroll, and I'll I watch a couple of videos." All of a sudden, this new path presented itself, and it was like, "Ooh, Jen Waldman posted. I haven't seen Jen Waldman post for a while. Let me see what she's got to say." And now, it's like, "This whole new path just opened for me because I watched the video of Jen talking about new paths." It's all very meta.

Jen: It also...you know, I'm so skeptical of what's actually happening on the social media platforms. But it was like such a beautiful reminder that what people really want, or at least the people who are following me, what they want is to connect, like to actually connect. The fact that I got so many private messages, I never in a million years would have expected that.

Pete: Yeah. Connection, who would have thought? Okay. So the question that I am now noodling on, having heard you talk about all of this and us unpacked it, is, what are the paths that I'm missing at the moment? And how might I either look for them, stay open to them, create space for them, knowing that there is some like, I don't know, some secret magic in serendipity that we just can't predict, like magical horses/donkeys?

Jen: I've quoted my dear friend, the brilliant musician and educator, Jasper Grant, many times on this podcast, saying, "Leave room for serendipity." And today, I would just want to amend that and add a little, "Leave room for and expect serendipity."

Pete: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.