I spent last week in Miami speaking at the annual conference for Million Dollar Round Table — an organization I had never heard of until a few months ago.
MDRT is a global, independent association for life insurance and financial services professionals that recognizes the best of the best. You can’t attend MDRT unless you reach specific sales figures that place you in the top tier of performers in these industries.
MDRT represents the best of the best.
I delivered a keynote at the conference’s opening to an audience of almost 6,000 people, and then I performed storytelling improv for that same audience on Monday and Tuesday, as well as a less formal talk to a couple of hundred people, a lovely dinner with organizers, and several meet-and-greets.
Busy days.
In a bizarre coincidence, on the day I was speaking to the Million Dollar Round Table for the first time, Elysha decided to watch a 1981 movie called “The Four Seasons,” which, to her astonishment, references the Million Dollar Round Table THREE TIMES throughout the film.
Elysha and I had never heard of the organization until a few months ago. For a moment, I nearly canceled the speech, not understanding the gravitas of the opportunity.
Then, on the day I spoke to them for the first time, Elysha was inundated with references to MDRT from a movie more than 40 years old.
You know what this signals. Right?
Coincidentalism — my personally-conceived and self-founded religion. Members of the faith (currently three in number) acknowledge and celebrate the remarkable nature of coincidences in this world while firmly rejecting the notion that a higher power is manipulating events to make them happen.
While we appreciate and admire the extraordinary nature of coincidences, we also view them as expected outcomes of an unfathomably enormous and complex system of interconnected parts and endless interactions.
Our belief can be boiled down to:
Coincidences are amazing! Also expected! Because math!
This doesn’t mean you can’t also hold some kind of religious belief. It simply means that coincidences are not a sign or signal of a higher power. They are glorious and astounding and should be celebrated, but they are also the natural consequence of our impossibly labyrinthine world.
Or, as Elysha proposed, perhaps we are really living in a simulation, and these moments represent tiny glitches in the code—infinitesimal mistakes in the endless string of ones and zeroes that create us and our reality.
Either way, it’s kind of amazing how these two events — my speaking at Million Dollar Round Table and Elysha plowing into references to MDRT in a movie more than four decades old — coincidentally collided last week in a singular moment.
If you’d like to become a member of Coincidentalism, you’re welcome to do so. Unlike many religions, we do not require you to take classes, tithe, study for years, dunk your head in water, stand before a court, take a bath, confess your sins, mutilate your genitals, or participate in any ceremony of any kind.
All are welcome to embrace Conincidentalism in all its glory and excitement in their own way.
