Luck, Synchronicity and Sanity Maintenance

Except that one does in reverse. Pet a black cat and be nice to it, the luck's got to go somewhere. Bring it home, feed it great food, give it lots of affection and you'll have a loving, intelligent, sensitive and caring animal in your life who looks after you when you're sick and is happy every time you come home. Actually, having a black cat is very good luck.

For one thing, your black cat keeps superstitious people from bugging you at home!

There's less traffic on Friday the 13th. People stay home, afraid of accidents.

Breaking a mirror means you've got a nasty mess to clean up. If you wait seven years to clear out all the sharp little glass bits, that's just irresponsible.

But then there are the things that are real luck. Serendipity. Luck that comes out of nowhere and fits your situation and immediate needs so well -- usually with more generosity than you could imagine, that it'll take your breath away or give you a spiritual awakening. There are these moments in life when everything goes more than right.

What can make that kind of super-luck happen more often?

Pay attention to it.

Notice it. Really notice it, appreciate it for what it is. I'm not going into religion here because this may be meta-religion. It can go beyond whether you're monotheist, atheist or as I am, polytheist. Someone out there likes you -- and that someone could just be the collective human unconscious if you happen to be atheist. Or your own unconscious putting you in the way of the best directions you can take in life to get what you really need and really want in life.

That serendipitous good luck can look like bad luck sometimes. Losing a job can seem like a disaster -- until you change your occupation and find one that fits you a lot better than a job that was a slow dead-end decline. Losing a spouse can be a heartbreak like losing part of yourself, until you realize some time later that you are much better off living your own life than locked into mutual misery with someone who can't stand the sight of you.

Some of that great serendipity comes in how you look at the changes in your life. Change comes to anyone and everyone, all the time. Loss can hurt. At the same time it almost always holds opportunity. The loss of something that was hurting you but hard to let go of can be the best thing that ever happened to you when you find something better afterwards.

There's the key to it, rolling with the punches. Looking for that weird up side and deciding to do something different when life's kicked you in the teeth.

When life kicks you in the teeth, usually human beings are on the other end of that boot. The number of bad things in life that get caused by natural disasters or predators or the risks that all living creatures face is very low compared to the risks posed by other people. The things you do will definitely come back to you in terms of how people respond if you're in trouble.

For one thing, every one of your false friends, moochers and hangers-on will drop off fast as soon as trouble bites. They're not getting anything out of your time and attention any more, so they're off to find someone else to lean on. Fair-weather friends are no friends at all, the loss is more apparent than real. Yet some people do come through in a pinch, some will help when things get rough. Those are the friends to treasure.

For another, anytime some loss like that comes into your life, along with it comes the loss of every one of its obligations and pressures. You don't have to put up with the long hours any more. You can actually get a full night's sleep without the fighting. You can eat a full meal without anyone harping on everything you put in your mouth and you can rearrange the place you live to suit your own liking.

You can decide to live somewhere that really suits you instead of what was convenient to the job or spouse or whatever just fell out from under you. You can stand back from the previous bad situation and see what went wrong in it, how it went from looking so good at the start to becoming such a nightmare step by small step. That's how bad situations grow.

You wouldn't marry a harridan or a jerk if they acted like that on the first date. You wouldn't sign on for a job where the supervisor yelled at you for combing your hair wrong if they did that at the interview, at least you'd like to think you wouldn't. If you fall into a repeating pattern of bad jobs or bad relationships, it can help to stop at the point it's all fallen apart and ask "What can I do differently so I don't wind up in the new version of the same old disaster?"

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

Sometimes they do pick on you on the first date. More often if you think back, they were going into bitter painful detail about their last love and how rotten they were, everything unthinkably rotten they were and did. If someone does that on the first date, run. That's what they'll be saying about you when the cycle's complete.

Sometimes the tone of the interview does set the conditions of the job and a lot of things that sound like opportunity aren't. Like "salaried position" and "estimated about 50 hours a week." No one in a salaried position ever gets paid for more time than they actually put in, unless they own the company or something. Instead, they put in about twice the hours that get listed as the estimate because that's a way for the company to not have to pay for every hour worked. That will always go to the company's advantage, the bargain is that you supposedly get more status for it. The company's interest is always to buy low, sell high -- get more out of you than they have to pay you for.

The only thing that can turn that around is to become indispensible. That's more rare all the time. It rests on expertise and the cost or trouble of finding someone to replace you. It can still be created if you're in a situation at work where you can accomplish things a lot faster and easier than other people (especially several other people) could and it's more cost effective for the company to pay you more than to hire several other people or train someone else to your specific expertise.

I think some of the IT wizards still hold on to that sort of situation in companies, sometimes it's something else that's the relevant expertise like a long list of contacts in an expert salesperson's book. But when you get a job where you're indispensible, it's something to handle well over time and weigh against the trouble and expense of finding a better paying job elsewhere. Sometimes it's specific to the company you're in and would not prove true in the next one even if they offered more.

So the best thing you can do to attract serendipity is to look at life in a way that's open to it. This means not beating yourself when things go wrong or automatically blaming other people. Drop the blame game. Even if it may be true, a lot of times it is, it doesn't do much good for your immediate situation other than to tell you that it's not your fault and you shouldn't be punished.

Bad things in life are not punishments.

They're either the consequences of something you and others did in the world -- often a combination of both -- or they really are just luck. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and racking up enormous debt, eventually, inevitably, something will happen to upset the applecart. It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's a medical crisis, a divorce, job loss or a raise in your cost of living. When you live on the edge and push the edge constantly, eventually you will get cut on that edge.

When you give yourself some elbow room in time and money, then there's a cushion when bad things happen. Luck goes up and down. Good things come to those who wait and those who are impatient. Bad things come to the deserving and the undeserving alike.

Most people beat themselves up too much. Even the ones who deserve it most beat themselves up too much. Paradox, isn't it? But listen to the way they do it. Stop to listen to what the average really rotten jerk will say when he's beating himself up.

"I'm such a loser. I can't help it. I pick on everyone all the time, I'm selfish, I'm nasty, I'm rotten. I'm just a loser and everybody knows it. I'll never be anything better than that. I'm bad news. I'm a loser."

Now if someone is saying this right off when you first met them and has had three beers too many that night, he's not someone you need in your life as a roommate! He'll mooch, he'll badmouth you, start fights constantly, give you a hard time about everything, never help and make your life a misery all along. But he can't do anything about it. That's part of the spiel and why his beating himself up is doing no good at all.

He's just advertising for someone who'll let him get away with that behavior for a while. Labeling himself to make it easy for any codependent to pick him up and believe they can turn him around. They can't. No one can. When he bottoms out and figures out that he doesn't need to act like that or label himself a loser, then he might get somewhere in life. Till then, he's a danger to anyone around him, even acquaintances.

But if when something rough happens in life, you stop to see what happened and then look at it from as many different directions as you can, you open the door for serendipity. Start by looking at the up side of bad things and the down side of good things.

Up side of bad things -- you hated that job and complained every day about how rotten it was. You were definitely in the wrong line of work. Best thing to do is figure out what way of making a living would make you happy -- what you like doing most, where you want to live, how you want to do that work, whether you're happier in a large company, a small company or self employed. What your real skills and abilities are. What your passions are and what you really do when left to your own devices.

Understanding yourself, being self-honest is essential to seizing the serendipitous life change.

You might find out after a divorce that you weren't the one who drove the credit cards up to the max. That it doesn't hurt much to stop using them at all and begin sorting out the debt. That you enjoy bargain hunting and don't have a problem living frugally... that living frugally means you have more time to spend doing the things you enjoy rather than working eighty or a hundred hour weeks just to get by and maybe manage the rent and bills.

It's good for about a week's fiery self righteous recognition that "spendaholic" was your ex's problem. After that, with the ex out of your life, it can turn into building some solid resources for the future and exploring self employment or an occupation that pays less but offers more satisfaction because something you did as a hobby is much more suited to your real inclinations and abilities.

There's a peculiar sense of frustration that comes with losing a job when the company goes bankrupt. When the last paycheck bounces because your boss, who was decent, did not get paid by the big customer that shafted him -- you know his paycheck bounced too and that someone three steps away was responsible for shafting the company. You go looking for work again with a clean slate. It definitely was something way beyond your control and it wasn't malicious, not aimed at you personally at all. That was getting stepped on by an elephant.

It happens to a lot of people in recessions.

It doesn't mean you didn't do a good job or that you're worthless. It doesn't even mean you can't get a better job -- it may mean that you get a much better one if you pick up and go in a new direction that suits you well. But it lacks the impetus of anger and a scapegoat to direct it at.

The blame game is a big waste of energy.

It distracts from applying sensible critique to your life decisions. Critique is not the same thing as criticism, something that is hard to distinguish in American life where criticism is taken for granted as everyone's right. The first, most frequent use of free speech is to blame someone -- usually as uselessly as our self-labeled Loser does, because the people who get blamed for things are either beyond consequences economically or already in such deep trouble that another teaspoon of it isn't going to make a difference.

That blaming can distract from the all-important question that comes with effective, supportive critique: "How can I fix it?"

When you're in the path of the tornado, the up side is that all the stupid little things you just put up with that may have accumulated for years till they formed an emotional landfill are gone too. It's a new start. The best use of a new start is to find a new, positive, productive direction that's going to take you where you really want to go, not just shunted down the cattle-chute of misery with all the blamers and blamed.

I've known a lot of unemployed guys who lose heart and stop looking for work early on. It's a pattern set on false assumptions. The biggest one is that rejection is some big freaking deal and something to take personally as an emotional blow to who you are and your value as a man, your importance as a human being.

People who do sales and marketing will look at rejection as this big, big number of false pings. A small percentage of successes is enough if you give it enough tries. That means not dozens but hundreds or thousands of searches sustained over time until something not only pans out but fits your needs. If you're looking for work, you can afford to look for the job you really want. Put the most attention and time into directions that suit your real dreams, not just whatever might be open.

You will actually be better suited for a job you love and care passionately about than for something that just needed a warm body. You will be more likely to get chosen than someone who lined up out of desperation and would settle for anything. Worrying too much about the presentation is as bad as doing a sloppy one -- if you look steadily and are reasonably honest in your presentation, you'll find the niche you'd actually fit.

That's what it is, a searching and matching game. The more honest your presentation in looking for work, the more likely you won't wind up in a job that has unreasonable expectations, a job you can't fill. You're also more likely to find coworkers you can get along with than people you can't stand driving you nuts every working hour.

So whenever you do look for work, go in like a cat sniffing out a new place. They are not the only ones judging at an interview. You're judging them too. If you're willing to walk out on a bad situation before it starts, you'll be glad you did when you find the good one that's also out there.

Think about changing what you actually do, unless you love it. If you did love it, then look for something similar but consider a different area, it may be easier to move than to hang on where there are no openings in your field. Or find another way to get into that field, possibly independently consulting or something like that.

I think in the future we will see more self employment. I know I'd like to see more self employment and more small companies emerge, because working for large companies is about the least stable type of employment there is and for all its risks, self employment is some of the most stable. This is because a self employed person can't be fired. Period.

You can lose a particular market or find out what you're doing wasn't cost effective but that just sets off a brainstorm on new ways to reach other markets. Successful self employed people usually try and crash a good dozen businesses before building one that lasts. It's how that career path works, there's a learning curve involved for everything from planning your time and budget to finding good markets to understanding what you do best and like most.

Sometimes the best time to start something like that is while unemployed when you do definitely have the time to throw into it and any returns that come in before unemployment runs out can get plowed right back into the business. So that's one way to seize bad luck and turn it into good, create something that will become serendipity when you look back on it.

I lost a job and a relationship in 1990 and relocated to a new area, then got a new job and lost that again a month later to the company firing everyone as it faced bankruptcy. I'd had it. I was fed up with everything and started selling my art -- just packed up a portfolio and went to the French Quarter with it. I got a commission for a poster that's still in print and from then on spent several of the best years of my life living as a self employed artist.

Within a year after that, I realized that no matter how much I'd liked my coworkers at my old job, I'd been a workaholic and was sleeping only two hours a night. I'd been driving myself into the ground at that job and was losing my health. I lived on a tenth of what I earned there but in more physical luxury with less worries about my bills because I lived in an area with a lower cost of living and didn't bother with any of the trendy stuff. I didn't need to overspend to make up after marital fights any more.

So that stroke of very bad luck turned into good luck -- now I'm seeing one in ten Americans facing that same situation of everything in life falling apart on losing a job. It'll wreak havoc on any marriages that aren't sound and solid. It'll buzz-saw through the lives of children and relatives too as people get depressed and intimate friends and relations need help beyond their loved ones' resources.

A lot of them are going to curl up in pain, dive under the couch and sit there dumbly watching the days go by filling them with video games and other time-wasters until unemployment runs out and there still isn't anything coming in. I've seen guys throw away their lives too many times doing that. Sometimes they wind up moving in with their parents again, ranging from an awkward situation to a personal disaster.

The only thing you can do in that situation that works is to look at it honestly and then look at what can be done -- for real -- what is actually in reach or not. Strip it of any blaming, strip it of any illusions and just use the freedom of that situation to choose a better situation. Some of the people displaced today will find their own paths to the life they always wanted.

This is the time to dust off your dreams and see which ones can be turned into goals and then into realities.