There is one force in this universe that has determined everything in your past and will determine everything in your future. This holy hand doesn’t consider your next move on the global chessboard in its never-ending entropic journey. It’s a force that can’t be controlled–but it can be harnessed.

Randomness.

I’m not talking about tweed-clad Englishmen in front of scribbled chalkboards, disciples of logic and reason intensely discussing Feynman and Friedmann with the fervor of street preachers. Nor am I referencing a stand-in for quirkiness: wearing cat ears to class, shouting words that come to mind, or filling math worksheets with song lyrics–more eccentric than erratic.

I’m talking about the exposure to new stimuli that you would have never found otherwise: vintage books on cream-based sauces, art house films about color theory, concept albums based on geological principles.

The common wisdom is that in order to have a more fulfilling life, you have to climb Annapurna or move to an Indian ashram. Drastic change can indeed shock you into a new way of being. However, if you learn to harness randomness, you will discover more excitement and intrigue in your daily routine than you could ever imagine. Randomness is a crucial component of getting more joy out of your life. All it takes is a little neuroscience and a willingness to test what I teach.

If you follow my method, you will be able to engineer coincidences with a startling amount of specificity. Harnessing randomness is a real-life superpower that I have never written about publicly. Until now.

It all begins with the brainstem. Connected to your spinal cord, this region of the brain helps controls important functions like regulating your heartbeat and breathing. The brainstem is one of the key points in the body that feeds information into the illusion machine you house in your skull. Inside is what’s called your (ascending) reticular activating system, or the RAS. It’s the beginning of a dense web of neurons spread out throughout the brain. The RAS is where our journey begins.

Two of the RAS’ key functions are to regulate attention and habituation. The RAS is the filter of the brain, meaning it has to deal with all the stimuli that it gets from other parts of the body: how green the grass is, what your shoes feel like against the soles of your feet, your sister talking to you from across the room, how hot your arms and legs are. The RAS decides what gets our conscious attention and what doesn’t. If we didn’t have a filtering mechanism for all the information we process every second of our lives, we would be perpetually overwhelmed. Though estimates vary, many scientists claim that the brain can process 11 million bits of information per second, but conscious awareness maxes out at roughly 50 bits per second. That means that a person consciously understands only .0055% of the information we perceive in our environment.

Habituation is the idea that the brain learns to dull responses to things in proportion to how much it experiences those things. The jump scare in the horror movie is terrifying the first time, but on your thirteen viewing, the fear is gone. You aren’t immune to all horror movies–just the one you’ve seen repeatedly. You’ve habituated to the stimulus of being scared during that particular movie, and your brain dulls your response to the thrills–no more rapid heart rate or sweaty palms.

Another example: you learn the word “precipitate” and suddenly see it everywhere. What was the last word you learned? You probably don’t remember–because you’ve become habituated to it, so it becomes just another word. Habituation is a form of learning that we don’t consciously realize works for us–or against us.

Many of us live our lives on auto-pilot, never truly engaging with the world around us until we bump into something new and unexpected. Then, that stimulus shows us a shiny, unexplored part of the world that was right in front of us the whole time. It was invisible in plain sight. The world used the word “precipitate” frequently before and after you learned it. There was a hidden universe in front of you–the word “precipitate” and its use in context–that you never noticed until you learned the word. And once you learn it, you’re temporarily attuned to that word and notice it everywhere.

Another example: take ten seconds to count all the instances of red that you see around you. The carpet, chairs, phone cases, paintings–you’re the judge here, so if you see it as red, go ahead and count it.

Got it?

Good.

How much green did you see?

This simple exercise illustrates an amazing reality: your RAS is an unconscious information filter, but it can be programmed through conscious effort.

But things get even more amazing. A thousand years ago, energy was a valuable resource; more energy equaled a better chance of survival. The brain needed an energy-conscious shorthand to understand the world with minimal effort. So the brain evolved to have cognitive biases–imprecise mental shortcuts that save energy but compromise accuracy. It’s why $9.99 and $10 seem different and why you remember the end of a movie more than the middle.

One of these mental shortcuts is called confirmation bias. At its core, the brain is a pattern recognition machine. It does this one thing extraordinarily well. But it also can harm us, like when we dig in our heels in support of our theory despite evidence that suggests otherwise. The brain wants to be right; once you settle on a theory about something, your brain tunes out conflicting information–rendering it nearly invisible. Don’t believe me? Click here for a great example.

This sort of priming happens without many of us knowing that we are doing it. When you “know” that Thanksgiving with extended family is going to be torturous and argumentative, you prime your filter to find information that confirms your suspicions.

The Law of Attraction, while a nice sentiment, is nothing more than reprogramming your RAS to pick up different stimuli in your environment than you were before. If you’re trying to network your way to seed money for your startup, you’ll set your pattern recognition system into overdrive every time someone starts a conversation with you; you’ll notice more in that conversation, even if it only tangentially pertains to funding.

This principle applies directly to finding more joy in your life. Look for joy today with a specific goal. “I am surrounded by friends.” “I thrive in this work environment.” “My world is full of wonder.” These statements aren’t weak affirmations you wish were true. They are codes to program your brain so that you will unconsciously search for and reveal that evidence to yourself. It seems like magic, but it’s just the brain’s operating system. You can thank your RAS for your good days and curse it for your bad ones, but ultimately, you control how well it goes.

Many people don’t realize that their RAS “makes” them have a bad day. So they don’t know that having a great day is as simple as consciously looking for evidence that things are going well. All you need is one data point that good things are happening to you, and you can turn your entire day around–no matter how late in the day it is.

Everyone wants more joy in their life. Programming your RAS and using confirmation bias pave the way.

It’s easy to see if the office kitchen stocked your favorite coffee to turn your bad day around. But what about the fascinating conversation your three coworkers are having that you don’t realize you would love to be involved in? How do you stumble upon the joy you don’t realize is all around you?

This is where randomness shines. Inject randomness into your world to see more of what you don’t see. Learning a new word is an imperceptibly small percentage of all the things that we humans miss. We live in a world bursting with opportunity, and randomness wakes us up. Remember: we filter out 99.99% of the information we perceive. Randomness brings some of that information back to conscious awareness.

When you incorporate randomness into your day as a practice, you see things that other people don’t see. You begin to peel back the layers of reality and you discover what has existed in front of you all along. The conversation about 17th century Bulgarian tapestries seems mundane and boring, but weirdly relevant after you watch a 1980s Bulgarian action movie. Randomness acts as a sieve, revealing hidden connections in your environment that you never knew were there because you never had anything to connect it to. Random inputs bring different information to conscious awareness that we can then use to find more excitement in our lives.

The word “precipitate” is just the beginning–there are infinite connections and coincidences waiting to be made. Everything you perceive–whether it’s an object, thought, sound, taste, texture, or something else–is a potential coincidence. Eating beef with cumin is ordinary, but eating beef with cumin when you’ve been researching Mexican spices gives the situation an entirely new meaning. Nothing changed except for your awareness.

Your environment already has all the excitement and novelty you need–you just filter out 99.99% of it.

There are three specific resources I recommend to introduce randomness into your life. I personally use all of these for random information, music, and books.

1. For Mac users, press Control + Option + X on any page on Wikipedia to pull up a random article. For PC users, you can find the “Random article” button on the left-hand sidebar of Wikipedia. Read the first paragraph. Do it as many times as you’d like, hopefully until you find an article that interests you enough for you to remember it.

Power user tip: if that’s not random enough, you can use the “What links here” to see all the Wikipedia entries of “book” or a type of media of your choice. Pick a random number (or try the three letter search detailed below) to choose a book or movie. Watch that movie or read that book, and be exposed to ideas you would have never found on your own.

2. The website everynoise.com is a full categorization of every genre on Spotify–6,078 at the time of this writing. The way that I like to discover music is to 1) come up with a random string of three letters like “aba” or “can” or “pol” and 2) search that string of words on the website by pressing Command + F on Mac and Control + F on PC and typing that string into the search box. You will see how many genres have those three letters in them. Choose a number between 1 and the last search result (23, for instance)–say you choose 15. Go to the 15th search result and listen to that genre.
3. whichbook.net is a book recommendation website that features lesser-known fiction books. The Trending Books section on the front page lists a random assortment of those books. Find a random book by picking a number between 1 and 10 and purchasing that book from your bookseller of choice.

Use this tool and watch it transform your life. Randomness gives your world a fresh coat of paint, and patiently waits for you to discover the excitement inside it, over and over again.