Be Open to Randomness

My friend, David Cohen has a saying, “be open to randomness.”

One day David walked into a 10 minute meeting with venture capitalist, Brad Feld who kept a few hours a week open specifically for what he called “random days” where anybody who wanted to meet with him could just walk on in. David wanted to tell Brad about an idea he had for a startup accelerator. By the end of the ten minute meeting Brad wanted to invest. The pair would become business partners and not long after, Techstars was born.

Techstars would become the world’s largest startup accelerator and help catalyze the global startup boom we’ve witnessed over the past eight years.

Kind of amazing.

It’s crazy where life might lead you when you are open to randomness.

Last week, after sixty days in South America, our preplanned itinerary ended. It was time for us to be open to randomness.

We weren’t sure where we wanted to go next, but we figured we should just keep heading south. We booked an Airbnb in an Ecuadorian city called Cuenca for two days.

When we got there, we fell in love. After two days Brittany said “maybe we should stay longer.”

“Why not! I’ve got nowhere to be. Let’s do it.”

We stayed for ten. I’m glad we did.

In the last ten days we:

• Somehow ran into one of my oldest friends. from California at a pizza restaurant on the fourth of July.
• Hiked the biggest peak in a National Park on my birthday

Trying my hardesr to not to get blown off the mountain in Cajas National Park

• Stumbled into the Ecuadorian Jazz Society for a night of jazz
• Ate farm fresh eggs and homemade jams every morning at our airbnb

The view from our host family’s kitchen

• Met a potential future mentor over dinner
• Saw a free symphony
• Spent countless hours in one of the greatest city parks we’ve ever been to

We <3 Parque de la Madre

• Tried out all the bathing caps and terrycloth robes in Ecuador

Treat yoself

• Used the free Wi-Fi in the prettiest plaza either of us has ever been to
• Became regulars at the local gelato shop (read: we went every day)
• Lingered over a two-and-a-half-hour Italian dinner

brittany: “these gnocchi are like mouth pillows”

• Finally felt like we were at home rather than “on the road”

hanging out at the casa doing regular old just-chilling-at-home-on-the-weekend-type-things.

• And fell in love with our Ecuadorian host family.

Zilpa, the most amazing organic cook slash hostess slash Spanish teacher in the world. Also a great hat wearer.

Santiago builds a race car bed for his grandson while roasting coffee beans for tokorrow’s breakfast

Given that Brittany and met each other in line at a taco shop, got married less than two years later, chose our wedding location (Banff) based on a picture from Google images and picked our honeymoon spot out of a hat, being open to randomness isn’t terribly new territory for us. But it was new for this trip. We had been sticking to a pretty tight schedule up until now. And though the tight itinerary has so far worked out pretty well for us, sometimes it’s nice to get back to your roots, let go and just trust the universe to determine your next moves. You never know where you’ll end up but chances are you’ll see some pretty wild things along the way.