Building things is kind of my jam. In fact, ever since I remember being a teenager, I’ve always been doing things online, building different projects, websites, businesses, and even side hustles to just learn about different things.
So in this article, I want to dig into a blog post by David Perell and then show how the principles from that blog post have really manifested themselves in the context of this YouTube channel, among other opportunities, through the years.
The blog post
To start things off, I want to explore at this blog post that I stumbled upon a couple years ago from David Perell. I felt like it really eloquently expressed a lot of things that I felt through the years of building things on the internet. And it really speaks to just different experiences in life as well. It reads the best opportunities are the ones you never expected. They’re serendipitous. Serendipity is a state of mind. Serendipity births unexpected opportunities, which fuel progress and push us in fruitful directions. By maximizing serendipity, you’ll accelerate your progress. Serendipity is a skill, which means it can be learned.
And I think that this is a really important intro segue to this blog post. But something that David Perell talks about is the importance of creating your own serendipity vehicles.
The importance of creating your own serendipity vehicles
In other words, things that help facilitate opportunities for you to be more serendipitous. This could be something as simple as making sure that any time that you meet somebody interesting asking them whether or not they know somebody know that they think might be interested in connecting with you or that you might get along with or doing something in which after every single podcast interview you’re on for whatever it is that you’re building, that you leave a place for people to connect with you, whether that’s on LinkedIn, Twitter, or whatever your preferred social network is.
David continues by speaking about the importance of building serendipity vehicles, as he puts it by making it easy for people to find you online, you’ll create a vehicle for serendipity. He gives examples about how his podcast became a segue for him to meet Neil deGrasse Tyson. He also talks about how publishing content regularly has been a way for him to connect with people that he otherwise wouldn’t have met.
By creating these sorts of serendipity vehicles, you’re able to stay connected or get connected to other people. If you think about it, it can also be viewed from the lens of creation. In fact, a good friend of mine for more than a year, just would interview different people in their respective niche and summarize key takeaways through these podcast interviews. Their podcast lasted for about a year and they got 52 episodes out of it.
And at the end of that year, they decided that it was time to shut it down. But even to this day, they still get new coaching clients that come in because of the podcast that they created several years ago. That’s pretty much the spirit of a serendipity vehicle. So when you think about whatever it is that you might be building, whether it’s online or in person, every single opportunity is an opportunity for you to create serendipity.
When you think about, for example, some of my YouTube videos recently, where I’ve shared different sites that I’ve built over the years, those sites have thousands of blog posts on them. And what I’m doing each time in those situations is I’m giving myself an opportunity for something to be a serendipity vehicle.
Sometimes when I do organic keyword research and I look for 25 different post ideas, I don’t know which one is going to actually be successful, but if I don’t take the shot and I don’t take the opportunity to just try to create valuable content in those respective areas, well, then I’ll never know whether or not any of them could be serendipity vehicles.
Truism about the internet
This is something that I think is a truism about the internet as well. The internet pretty much allows people to connect to others in a way that no other past generation of humans have been able to do before. If you think about it back in the day, you used to be limited to the 150 or so people that were in your immediate community.
It might be through some sort of religious affiliation, small community affiliation in your local city or town, but it was something in which you wouldn’t really meet people that might be of similar interest to you, or that might just be intriguing to you unless you were a frequent traveler somewhere.
But nowadays what you can see with the exponential growth of the access to the internet, there are so many new potential connections that you’re able to make, not just in your home country, but also in other countries across the world.
This is one of my favorite things about what technology has done for the world. Even though there are certainly problems with technology in terms of creating genuine connection with different people. It does allow us to have new opportunities that otherwise we wouldn’t have in a prior generation.
How I’ve seen this myself
I’ve actually seen this myself through my YouTube channel. All I’m doing in my YouTube channel is teaching people a few years behind me what I learned years ago in hopes of being able to connect with them and teach them the skills that might be useful in their own lives in some sort of way. I’ve had comments where people tell me how the things that they took away from my channel allowed them to land a job that they otherwise wouldn’t have or even if you think about the context of my very first videos on my channel, I made those videos on how to buy and sell on Facebook Marketplace.
A perfect example of serendipity vehicle
I’ve told the story before about how I only made those videos because I had no idea how to make a video at that time. And so I figured it was an easy enough topic that I could teach it.
And little did I know from creating those videos that I would get thousands of views for that respective content. If you had asked me if that video that I had spent more than 10 hours making teaching people how to improve their Facebook Marketplace listings would generate $1,600 for me, just because I was willing to share with the world, what I knew about my own experiences from Facebook Marketplace, I would’ve said that there’s no way.
But from just putting this out there, what I was able to do was create a lot of value for different people to learn about the sorts of things that might be useful for them as they start to create things on Facebook. And this is a perfect example of a serendipity vehicle, because if I hadn’t taken the opportunity to improve myself in terms of learning video editing, scripting, and things like that, while then this wouldn’t have happened.
This is something in which, you know, this would’ve just stayed in my head and I wouldn’t have been able to connect with different people.
So in the case where you’re on the fence about starting that website, starting that side project, or even maybe that YouTube channel, I hope that you’ll take this article to heart in that you’ll build your own serendipity vehicles and get a lot out.
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to create your own serendipity vehicle.