How to Rise from College

Photo by Charles DeLoye on Unsplash

Serendipity

I first encountered the word serendipity when I was reading Ryan Holiday's book The Obstacle is the Way. And I came to know that actually, the word originated from a fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. Knowing this reminded me of how I turned a place like "Nyampande" into "Nyampandety" (Hahaha—by the way, Nyampande is a real place I know in which the name literally means you're lost and wandering around doing nothing!).

Unlike my made-up word, "serendipity" became a functional term based on the actions of the princes in this tale: "As their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of,"

Serendipity now officially means a situation where you come to discover or get good things unexpectedly from random encounters. By the way, I learned this word through serendipity too (hahaha serendipity in action!).

You may get good things from random encounters—opportunities, connections, and more—but if you've noticed something here; you were moving towards something and then encountered something else useful that you didn't have planned for; This is not like you were sitting in your room with your legs crossed, waiting for good things to come to you.

At risefromCollege, we dubbed this concept as #moreExposure

#moreExposure

This simply means what is that you don't know so that you should know about it.

You can collect these nuggets of what you don't know every day; one best approach can be by trying to know how things are done around the world by the best practitioners in your career or anything else you are interested in—whatever the way, but in the end, the core thing is for you to reduce the size of what you don't know in your field of interest through reading books, magazines, and online content, or simply by talking with people involved with the things you want.

Sometimes "unfortunately," these pieces of information you get may be termed as useless (for now, where will you use them?!), but one thing I'm sure of is that one day you will be able to encounter a good opportunity—or in the most fascinating way, you may be able to use what you know now and other information to come up with something novel in the future (this is what we call connecting dots, and it is one of the common ways great innovations came to exist).

There are many opportunities that we pass by simply because we didn't look wide enough to see them; maybe we were too busy with something else; but if you become fixated on only what you know now, you won't be able to expand your zone of opportunities.

Just a reminder; it's difficult to know everything; a rule of thumb for this is to just follow your interests.

#buildUpSkills

You have to take charge of the opportunities you meet with. If you don't have the capabilities to execute on them, they will be wasted. To be able to do these, you need to be equipped with essential skills. Try your best to be good in your studies—not only by memorizing facts but also by learning how to use them perfectly in the field. Learn other important skills that are important or have captured your interest.

When the moment comes for you to be able to extract value from opportunities, the skills you have built up will be your greatest tools; this can even be a bonus point if your skills will make you stand out among your peers when competition becomes a factor.

#TryOutThings

I always see curiosity as the north star to guide where you can go. Anything that can capture your attention and you find interesting, follow up on it, even if it will not be worth it in the end, even if it will be a failure—just follow through on it. You never know what you will stumble across; it might be the chance that will be your breakthrough—and that is what serendipity is all about; the world is full of "randomness," and you will never get the perfect view to take a shot all the time, but if you have the courage to try out things, you will increase the odds of hitting the jackpot in the future.

To risefromCollege early on, you have to make sure that you have #moreExposure to things that interest you, you do #buildUpSkills which can help you to execute well on any opportunity you encounter, and finally have the gut to #TryOutThings even if they fail.

#moreExposure #buildUpSkills #TryOutThings

Thanks to Joyce, Joyce-P, Stivin, Elly, Bernadetta, and Samora for reading drafts of this.