How I found my house through 6 degrees of separation.

21 Dec 2022.

A very interesting thing happened to me recently. When I got back from overseas, I had to find a house at very short notice. With 5 days to go, I had no idea what to do - but this wasn’t my first time. :P In my moments of pure chaos, I posted to my instagram story - “hey does anyone have a place in Sydney”.

Out of nowhere, a mate I’d met at a party some 6mo earlier responded. “Yeah man, weirdly we just had something open up”. I went there and boom, I was on my feet thanks to Pete. What a legend. With 3 days to go, I had found the most fucking amazing house with the most amazing people. How in hell did this happen?

Well, I knew Pete because of this party. We both started pretending to be Swedish people and started talking about having this shared grandmother called “Olaf Olaffson”. People kept coming up to us and it’s like they were unknowingly invited into our own little world. It was hilarious.

The party was actually at the house of a Swiss girl I’d met the week earlier, Camilla. We were both invited to this boat party because of Jordan, who’d met Camilla’s sister while he was in Europe. It was Jordan’s birthday.

It’s funny because Jordan lives in Sydney, is from Brissy (like me), but I actually met the first time in Sweden, some 2yrs earlier! What were we doing in Sweden? My mate Felix has this annual waffelfesten, where they just cook a bunch of waffles and have a party.

Finally, how did I meet Felix? Well, when I moved from Brisbane to Sydney, I studied IT. And one day I walked into the first “computer networking” class, looked around, and tried to find the guy who looked least like an incel. That’s how I met Felix. This was about 5yrs ago now, when he was on exchange in Sydney from Sweden.

This all was made really interesting when the day I moved in, Felix had literally just come back to Sydney to visit. Let’s draw the chain of people:

Felix (2015, Sydney) -> Jordan (2019, Stockholm) -> Camilla (2022 Mar, Sydney) -> Petey (2022 Dec, Sydney) -> my current place

How interesting and serendipitous is this? Over the span of 7 years, I’d lived in Brisbane, Sydney, then Amsterdam, and then Sydney again. At each point I met one of these people. Because of Felix, I guess I found a place to live?? And the day I moved in, person #1 met person #4.

There is something very weird I realised when this happened. If you look at the dots connecting backwards, you can start to imagine what the world really looks like. You know that there are probably things out there that you don’t know about.

I didn’t know there was a 1970’s Italian Art Deco mansion in Randwick. Somehow, in this fucking insane universe of possibilities, I went from having no place to go with 5 days notice, to living in literally the best place I’ve ever lived. But maybe it’s not so insane?

Maybe a more realistic way to look at the world is that it’s really close. After all, all of these people interacted at a distance of 10’s of thousands of kilometres - Felix is from Stockholm, Sweden, Jordan is from Brisbane, Australia, Camilla and her sister who Jordan met are from Switzerland, Peter is in Sydney. Even Sydney to Brisbane is at least 1000km away.

Maybe it’s easier to understand visually. This is the path to how I found my house.

What happens if we think about it in reverse?

Who do we have to meet to find [x]? Who do we have to meet to find the one? Or find that new job we’ve been searching for? Or whatever?

Once you think about it this way, you realise that a lot of things in life are dependent on the path you take. And when you start looking at the world through path dependence, things make a lot more sense.

There are a lot of variations of this idea of looking at the world. You might have heard quotes like “being in the right place at the right time”. Or “luck is opportunity plus preparation”.

One way to reframe these quotes is this idea that the right place is actually where you are in your path. For example - I was in the right place to find this house. The preparation was me being vocacious, ADHD, extroverted, whatever. The luck / right-time was that Pete’s housemate had literally just left, and they were searching for someone. Without having met all of these wonderful people, it wouldn’t have happened.

There is actually a lot of examples of this in different areas of life (see the appendix for some detail). Business, relationships and love, the etymology and evolution of languages, all of these things evolve via a path you cannot predict. But you can understand the mechanism as to how.

I guess my conclusion is now I see things differently. Now I look at them like this:

You don’t know when the paths will connect up. But at the same time, you do know that they connect. The question is, how do you find out where to walk?

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

It’s funny to quote Steve Jobs but he’s got a point. Whatever the way you look at it, you have to begin with trust. Trust that you can figure it out, trust your instinct that you know where things will lead to. It will make all the difference.

So maybe let’s evaluate things not on just what they are, but where they might lead us to. Each project is a stepping stone to other projects, each person a connection to a wider world. Life is full of colour, you just have to look for it.

Appendix

Examples of path dependency.

Social networks. Why did Facebook beat Myspace, despite having the same features? Their CTO wrote about “The Path Matters”.

“At each point in the punctuated growth of our user base we have had to refine our product to make it more general and more universal. We react to their feedback and usage of the product. At the same time, our user base is itself evolving not only in composition but also in their comfort level with new technologies”.

Business. “Whenever you want to understand someone’s success, understand how they solved for distribution”. Lex Friedman is a deeply popular podcaster now, but did you know how he got there? I would suggest reading @visakanv’s thread.

Relationships and love. When you are dating early in your 20’s, there are a lot of single people. As you get older, there are less. These things vary from country-to-country - I remember one Italian telling me most of them don’t really finish uni and enter the workforce until they’re 28. That’s gotta be different to Australia, where people begin to settle around 24. Do you move to Italy then? That’s a choice. Your choices early on - whether to invest more and settle or search more and explore - these are paths. And even the idea of “what the one looks like” is a path in itself as you try to figure out what you want.

The English language. You can see the evolution of languages as a pattern of path dependency. English is one of the weirdest and most highly irregular languages for this reason - it began as Old English, a dialect of German, but after the invasions of Scandies and the French, it started evolving into a weird mix of Germanic, Latin, and French influences. Take this from “Why is English so weirdly different from other languages”:

“The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin – note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.”

Etymology is a fascinating look into how path dependence works, and very accessible. Every name has a history and you can discover it by looking it up on wikitionary. For example, I did this for my own name. “Liam” derives from Willhelm, meaning protector. “Willhelm” originates from a German phrase, meaning will of the helmet. For more interesting words, @visakanv has an amazing twitter thread here. And another one on the etymology of programming things cool too.

“Yield farming” aka how meme tokens get their value. Although he’s disgrace, SBF articulated a deeply interesting thing about “yield farming” in an interview with Matt Levine. Yield farming is a process of reification, that is entirely different to the classical Ponzi structure. While you may disagree on what’s valuable (which is fair), it’s interesting to learn about why people value these things and how that even comes into action - the path.

A more fleshed out diagram of the path I took to getting this house.