Can you train serendipity?

A few years ago, I began a series of books under what I called "The Academy of Commonplace Magic." These were books that bordered fiction and personal development. I'll be releasing in the future full-on fiction books on this series that follow best friends Leveret (the Collector) and Riyan (the Little King) as they battle the embodiment of dark spirits we encounter too often in this era.

The first book I released under the series is called The Wise Man's Guide to Commonplace Magic, which acts like a companion book (textbook?) for the series. But I'm in the process of resizing this to match the second book. I much prefer the 6x9" size of the second book and its vector art approach that I'm editing the first book to match this. I'll announce it here once the fix is done.

But for now, I am glad to announce that the second volume in the series, The Serendipity Journal, is out on Amazon. The books stand on their own so you can go ahead and get yourself a copy of the journal without the first one. And yes, it's a journal, not a book.

Can you train yourself to be luckier?

While I don't believe in luck as we know it, I do believe that there are people to whom more coincidental things happen. I've encountered them, from both ends of the spectrum. I have an aunt who always wins whenever there's a raffle. And I met a friend of my parents' who's life seems like a sequence of constant misfortune, no matter how much help she receives. Luck, coincidences, serendipities, people seem to have more or less of these things. This was not surprising, really, since one of the laws of Commonplace Magic (yes, I know, I made up the term) was that the more you have, the more will be given to you.

It was the same principle that made the rich richer and the poor poorer. This law, this mechanism is true in country economics, but also true in the smaller scale. Companies who have clients are the ones who get more clients, while the ones who don't can't seem to catch a break (speaking through experience). I mean, think about it. You're more likely to buy an item on Lazada when there are people who've already bought the item, right? In employment, those who have jobs are the ones with headhunters hounding them and offering them new opportunities, while those who are unemployed and desperately looking for a job can't seem to find anyone who'd give them a chance.

This is true with love and relationships as well. And I did a little experiment with paperclips, where I linked two paperclips I picked at random, regardless of if the paperclip already had paperclips attached to them or not. The paperclips with attachments are always the ones that got longer. This "rich gets richer" principle seems to be part of a larger law of statistics. But I won't bore you with math right now. My point is, this principle is pervasive in the different aspects of our life and not just in "luck."

So, wait, does that mean we can't do anything about it? Are the poor doomed to be poorer, the unfortunate sentenced to be more unfortunate, the unloved fated to be even more unloved? Before we continue down that path, let me bring your attention to a statement from the parable of the talents. If you remember that parable, the third servant who didn't make use of the talents entrusted to him had his talents taken from him and given to the one with ten talents (Rich gets richer principle! Why not give it to the one who only has five so it's more equal, right?). Why? Because:

For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. (Matt 25:29)

Okay, so we got the first part. It's the principle I was explaining until now. But turn your attention to the second sentence of the verse. Isn't it a little strange? They already don't have. What else will you take from them? That got me thinking. We don't really have nothing, do we? A true vacuum is so hard to achieve in our world. All we could really have is an approximation of nothing.

Think about it. When you say, "I have no money," more often than not, you have a little money. It's just not as much as you'd like it to be. When you say, "I'm so unlucky," that doesn't mean absolutely no positive coincidences ever happen to you. And when you say, "nobody loves me," you often just mean that the person you want to love you doesn't. But there are people who love you like a few friends or your grandmother.

We actually have. They're just a little granular, a little unfrequent, a little off from the ones we really want. But we have. 

So, if we have, can I be given more? The answer is yes. If you are among the people who have, then you'll now fall under the first category: the ones who will be given more. But how do I encourage life to give me more then?

By collecting.

By owning those instances, no matter how small. By acknowledging that those little coincidences are your little serendipities. Yours. You have money. A peso is money. You have good fortune. That parking space you found is a lucky instance. You have love. Even if it's just from your dog, you have it.

Collect them. Find just one little serendipity in a day. Do it for seven days. Do it for a month. Then, stretch yourself and start looking for three in a day. Then maybe four. Write it in the journal so you won't forget. And just as space debris coalesce into a larger form, you'll eventually end up with a dwarf planet-level of serendipity. Or wealth. Or love. And as a massive structure, you won't need to collect on your own so much. The mass will draw the serendipities to you on their own. Until you eventually clear up the space you occupy and find yourself a proper planet: properly serendipitous.