Express yourself.

The world responds to what you do, not what you think.

Feb 19, 2026

Truth 3: You are your purpose.

This is the final component of our investigation into “The Three Truths No One Tells You.”

Component 3: Serendipity as strategy.

When you stop hiding and start expressing, you become an active conduit in life’s generative flow—allowing what is meant for you to finally find you.

Live Discussion: We’ll explore this concept live on Zoom, February 27th at 1pm EST—details at the end.

“All of us have wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.” ~ Charles Dickens

In 1754, English author Horace Walpole coined a word that would change how we think about emergence. He’d been reading a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip—Serendip being the old Persian name for Sri Lanka—in which three princes traveled constantly, “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” Not blind chance. Not wishful thinking. Not sitting still and visualizing what you want until the universe delivers it. Serendipity.

Serendipity requires two things: an unexpected encounter, and the wisdom to recognize its potential. Alexander Fleming didn’t just luck into discovering penicillin. He had a contaminated petri dish—the accident—but instead of throwing it away, he had the presence of mind to notice the mold was killing bacteria. The sagacity to see what mattered.

You can’t manufacture serendipity. But you can’t sit still and wait for it either. Because serendipity isn’t passive. It’s the art of making yourself available to what wants to find you.

Life is relationship. Engagement. Emergence. Play. Feelings moving between things. We’re not isolated characters navigating a world that exists separately from us. We’re woven into it. There are no bees without fragrant flowers. No flowers without beautiful bees. The peacock doesn’t hide in the forest wishing a mate would appear. It unfolds its magnificent feathers, steps into the clearing, and expresses what it is. That’s not arrogance. That’s nature. And you’re nature too—though you’ve been trained to forget it.

You’ve been taught that expressing yourself fully is somehow crass. Self-promotional. Attention-seeking. Manipulative. That the honorable path is to keep your head down, work hard, and hope someone notices. That putting yourself out there makes you a fraud or a phony. But what if the real fraud is hiding what’s alive in you? What if the phoniness is pretending you don’t have something worth expressing?

Think about the environments you move through. The people you encounter. The conversations you have—or avoid. Most of us navigate life like we’re moving through a museum: quietly, politely, trying not to disturb anything. We treat connection like networking—strategic, transactional, something we do when we need something.

But life doesn’t work that way. Life is a garden, not a vending machine. You don’t insert the right coins and get the outcome you want. You plant seeds, tend the soil, and stay present to what emerges.

Here’s what people who seem perpetually lucky understand: engaged curiosity opens more doors than strategy ever will. They cultivate genuine interests in multiple areas—not to optimize their network, but because they’re genuinely fascinated. They notice connections between seemingly unrelated things. They take the scenic route instead of the fastest path, because the detour is where the unexpected lives. They build relationships not because those people might be useful someday, but because something about the exchange feels alive.

And critically—they leave space in their lives for discovery to happen.

Most people pack their calendars so tightly there’s no room for serendipity to slip through. Every minute scheduled, every outcome predetermined, every conversation transactional. But serendipity needs empty space the way fire needs oxygen. It needs room to breathe. Time to notice. When every hour is accounted for, when you’re racing from obligation to obligation, you miss the chance encounter in the hallway, the conversation that could have happened if you’d lingered, the idea that needed five more minutes to crystallize.

This is where the manifestation crowd gets it catastrophically wrong. They tell you to spend hours visualizing your dream life, feeling as if you’ve already achieved it, acting as if success is already yours. And here’s what actually happens: you feel accomplished without accomplishing anything. Your body relaxes. Your motivation drains away. You’ve already experienced the emotional reward in your imagination, so why do the actual work? You send fewer applications. You make fewer calls. You take fewer risks. You mistake the fantasy for the reality—and reality doesn’t care what you imagined.

The research is unambiguous: people who spend more time in positive fantasy about their future actually achieve less. They receive fewer opportunities. They get worse outcomes. Because they’ve confused daydreaming with doing. They’ve mistaken the feeling of success for the resistance and friction required to create it.

Think of yourself as a flower.

You could either say that you—the flower—cause bees to move toward you. Or you could say that bees value movement toward you. Scientifically speaking, both statements are exactly the same. But metaphorically speaking, they’re worlds apart. To believe that you cause things to move toward you implies certainty and control. To believe that things value movement toward you implies preference and chance. One makes you anxious and grasping. The other makes you alive.

This is the paradox most people can’t tolerate: you can’t force serendipity, but you also can’t be passive. You have to express yourself—fully, repeatedly, without knowing what will come of it—and trust that what’s meant to find you will. That terrifies people. Because expression without guaranteed outcomes feels reckless. Wasteful. Like you’re throwing energy into a void. But nothing ventured, nothing happens.

You want serendipitous encounters? You want to stumble into the conversation that changes everything, meet the person who opens a door you didn’t know existed, discover the idea that rewrites your understanding? Then you have to move. You have to be a dancing flower. You have to put yourself in environments where your inner intelligence senses connection—even when you can’t explain why. You have to speak up in the meeting. Share the half-formed idea. Show the work you’re not sure is ready. Start the conversation with the stranger who fascinates you. Not because you’re networking. Not because you’re trying to get something. Because something in you needs to come out.

Most people live like closed flowers, wondering why nothing beautiful lands on them.

They stockpile their ideas, waiting for the perfect moment to share them. They hold back their enthusiasm, afraid of seeming too much. They edit themselves into something acceptable, palatable, safe—and then wonder why life feels flat. And with each thing you withhold, each conversation you avoid, each risk you don’t take—your world gets smaller.

The universe doesn’t reward restraint. It responds to what you’re actually putting out into the world. You think you’re being strategic by waiting. But what you’re really doing is starving yourself of the encounters and information that would feed you. You’re cutting yourself off from the friction, the exchange, the aliveness that only happens when you let what’s inside you meet what’s outside.

So stop shrinking yourself to make yourself and others comfortable. Stop treating your aliveness like it’s something embarrassing that needs to be managed. You have wonders hidden in you. But they need circumstances to evoke them. And circumstances don’t find you when you’re hiding. Express yourself. Not recklessly. Not without thought. But fully. Honestly. With the same natural confidence a peacock has when it spreads its feathers.

Not because you’re chasing an outcome. Not because you’re trying to control what happens next. But because what’s inside you is meant to be outside you. Because expression is relationship. Because you’re not a closed system—you’re part of the flow.

Unfold your petals. Step into the clearing and dance. Let the world see what you are. And watch what moves toward you.

The Age of Unknowing

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?