I don’t know if you would call me a nihilist, an anarchist, an agnostic, or an existentialist.
The truth is I don’t even believe in putting a label on myself, whether it’s philosophically, religiously, or politically.
I don’t believe in anything except chaos.
Yet, paradoxically, I also believe in serendipity.
In this week’s episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I discuss the fascinating way that chaos and serendipity inform our lives, our careers, and our art.
Listen now!
The Writing Coach Episode #186 Show Notes
Download the FREE Scene Alchemy Essentials Checklist Now!
The Writing Coach Episode #186 Transcript
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach, Kevin T. Johns here.
Now, here’s the thing about me: I don’t really believe in anything.
I don’t know if you would call me a nihilist, an anarchist, an agnostic, or an existentialist. I don’t even believe in putting a label on myself philosophically, religiously, or politically. I don’t really believe in anything except chaos. Yet, paradoxically, I also believe in serendipity.
I don’t think there’s a plan. I think most of life, in reality, is just total chaos. But I do believe that when you do things, stuff happens. Let me tell you a little bit of what I’m talking about here.
When I was first starting my coaching business, I joined a small business training website and community called Fizzle. It had a series of courses for small business owners, and one of the courses was ‘Book Yourself Solid Essentials’. This course was taught by a coach and instructor named Jason Billows.
Within Fizzle, there were two dozen different courses, and I have no idea why, but for some reason, this Book Yourself Solid course really appealed to me; it really spoke to me. I became curious about the teacher teaching this guide, Jason Billows. Fizzle had instructors and coaches from all across North America, probably all across the world, so Jason Billows could have been from anywhere in the world. I look him up, and it turns out he lives in my neighborhood!
Maybe there was some subtle accent to the way he spoke or some vibe that I sensed about him that seemed subconsciously to communicate to me that he came from my area of the world; I don’t know. Nonetheless, I ended up working with him as my coach and as my friend for many, many years now.
If I hadn’t joined Fizzle, I wouldn’t have seen this Book Yourself Solid course. If that Book Yourself Solid course hadn’t resonated with me, I wouldn’t have looked up the instructor. If I hadn’t looked into the instructor, I never would have realized he lived like ten minutes from me. If I didn’t know he lived ten minutes from me, maybe I wouldn’t have had the trust to hire him. If I hadn’t hired him, my business never would have grown the way it has, and he had such a huge impact on me and my business.
Now, let’s take this even further…
Through Jason, I met another writing coach named Doug Kurtz, and we became friends and colleagues. Last year, when I had some major surgery, and I had to take time off work for a couple of months, guess who stepped in to cover for me in my group coaching programs? Doug Kurtz.
If I hadn’t joined Fizzle, I wouldn’t have seen Book Yourself Solid. If I hadn’t seen Book Yourself Solid, I wouldn’t have seen Jason Billows. If I hadn’t investigated Jason Billows, I wouldn’t have found out he lived in my neighbourhood. If I hadn’t found out he lived in my neighbourhood, I wouldn’t have hired him to be my coach. If I hadn’t hired him to be my coach, I would never have met Doug. If I had never met Doug, who knows what would have happened when I had to take some time off work to recover from surgery? Maybe there wouldn’t have been any other writing coaches out there that I trusted enough to fill in for me, and who knows what that would have meant for my programs?
This is what I’m talking about . . . where I really don’t believe in fate, and yet, there does seem to be some sort of causality to that story. There does seem to be some sort of serendipity that ensured that things tended to work out alright in the end.
It makes me think of the latest version of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE group coaching. We have that going right now, and on our first call, where everyone was introducing themselves, one of the writers introduced herself and talked about how the majority of her time is spent taking care of her special needs kids. Then we go to the next member of the program, and she reveals the book she’s already published is a book about taking care of her special needs son. If these two writers hadn’t joined Story Plan, and if they hadn’t made the choice to upgrade to group coaching, they never would have connected with each other. Now that they have, I suspect they’re going to learn from each other and grow together as writers, but also as parents.
When I graduated from university, one of the first things I did was join a team of people to launch an online magazine. Now, twenty years later, I’m still friends with the executive editing team of that magazine. The writing, publishing, editing, and internet skills I learned while helping to run that magazine, I’m still using today as an editor and a writing coach who runs his own website.
Early in my author career, I was exploring the option of being a ghostwriter, and how I got my foot in the door to becoming a ghostwriter was I volunteered to ghostwrite a book for someone for free. Now, it might sound crazy to ghostwrite someone’s book and take nothing from it other than a testimonial, yet the testimonial from that volunteer project allowed me to launch my career as a ghostwriter. For whatever serendipitous reason or chaotic reason, my ghostwriting career ended up primarily focusing on business leaders, folks who have run big giant companies and who were maybe nearing retirement age and were looking to share their wisdom with people through books. Maybe they were not polished writers themselves, but they had so much wisdom to share, so they hired me to help them get that into their books. Through that ghostwriting process, I learned so much about leadership that I’ve applied to my coaching business, that I’ve applied to the work I do with the Canadian federal government, and that I’ve applied to leading my family.
I don’t feel like there’s some sort of clear path here from volunteering to write a book to ghostwriting professionally to learning about leadership to applying that to my life, and yet . . . I mean, it sure sounds like a path, right? It kind of sounds like some sort of serendipity going on.
Here’s another example of that chaotic serendipity that changed my life forever.
When my first book was published, it was reviewed here in the Ottawa newspaper, The Ottawa Citizen. Coincidentally, another author had published her book around that same time, and her book got reviewed next to my book in that same issue of the newspaper. For whatever reason, she took the initiative to reach out to me and say, “Hey, we’re both new authors, and we both just had our books reviewed in the same issue of the newspaper. Let’s get together and chat.” I was like, “Wow, this is very cool. This is neat!”
So I met up with her in a coffee shop . . . in fact, in the opening credits for this show, for 187 episodes of The Writing Coach now, you can hear a clip from a talk that she and I gave eventually to the Canadian authors Association, where I described meeting her for the first time, and I say that line about “It was like meeting the writer in its natural habitat.” I met her in this coffee shop, and it was really one of my first times connecting with another artist and another writer. We sat and drank coffee, and we talked, and it felt like we talked for ten minutes, but when we looked at our watches, it had been like three hours; the time just flew by. A friendship was instantly formed. We just instantly connected with one another from that first meeting.
A few weeks later, we were at a book conference together here in Ottawa, selling our books, but it was getting kind of quiet. There weren’t that many people coming around at a certain point during this conference. She and I were talking, and I think we both mentioned that we were interested in starting podcasts. Since things were kind of quiet at this conference, we said, “Hey, why don’t we start our podcast this second?” We went around and started interviewing other authors about their careers and about their books. That was the start of our first podcast together, Ottawa Writes. We ended up doing dozens and dozens and dozens of episodes of that show together. That show ended up evolving into another show called Write Along Radio. She and I really became creative partners who have worked together very closely as podcast co-hosts for quite some time. It was through working with her doing hundreds of episodes of podcasts that I learned the skill of podcasting. Is also where I learned to polish and develop my skills for interviewing. And if it weren’t for all of those experiences, you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast, right now.
If I hadn’t gone through the work to publish a book, if she hadn’t gone through the work of publishing a book, if some journalists hadn’t gone through the work of reviewing both our books together, if she hadn’t decided to reach out to me, and if I hadn’t accepted that initiative, we never would have met, we never would have become friends. We wouldn’t have gone to that book conference together, and we wouldn’t have started interviewing authors at the conference; we wouldn’t have started Ottawa Writes, which means we would never have done Write Along Radio, which means I would never have done The Writing Coach Podcast, which means you would not be reading these very words right now.
It all sounds so formulated and causal, and yet, I truly believe it’s so chaotic and simply serendipitous.
What does all of this have to do with writing? What does my unwillingness to subscribe to a philosophy, a religion, or a political stance have to do with writing?
Well, I think it goes back to that Benjamin Franklin quote, where he says:
That is what I want you to take away from this. As a writer, you don’t want to just sit in your basement staring at that screen, typing words onto the page; do things, get out there, experience life, take chances and see where it leads you! There is a beautiful, chaotic serendipity to life and existence, and you absolutely never know where life or writing is going to take you.
While I don’t have faith in a particular political party, I don’t have faith in any religious doctrine, and while I don’t necessarily have faith in fate itself, I do believe that there is a beautiful serendipity to the chaos of existence.
Get out there, have fun, experience life, take chances, and do things worth writing about.
That is it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. Hit that subscribe button, and I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
