What was I thinking when I came up with the title for this post? It sounds intriguing and intelligent. This is the premise for the rest of the words that prop up on your screen.
Life is full of simple complexities. Everyone is dealt a unique set of cards that fire random set of chemical reactions that lead to thoughts, actions and more sporadic but predictable explosions. In a sense, the beauty of the system is in the randomness. That you can take a duplicate of someone with all their experiences and thoughts and put them in the exact same situation and end up with different results. Without chance, we would all converge to be the same.
Even nature hates the reduction of chance. Why else would inbreeding cause such problems. Take it sideways into physics and quantum and the randomness of everything seems so perfectly designed.
What is one thing that tends to pique curiosity? When someone we thought was going to behave one way, behaves in totally unpredictable manner. Would you watch movies if there wasn’t progress in the way they tried to surprise you? Not only is randomness in everything around us, but we seek it. We love chance.
The marvel of success isn’t so much in the success itself, it’s in what number of events had to happen to get you there and the unlikelihood of them all. I recently met a guy who talked himself from homeless to a producer of top rated Hollywood movies. What were the things that stood out? Not the success, but the number of highly unlikely events that led him there. I believe he was always likely to achieve great things, but the path and the actual events would have been different every time.
When the next big event happens in your life. Take a moment to appreciate all the things that led to it. Sometimes I laugh at how my life has turned out and how different it could have been from the smallest choices. Choices that were the result of a semi-complex brew of experiences, genetics, and hormones affected by what I chose to eat and drink that day which itself was a result of the same.
Getting ahead in life is simple. There are countless motivational posts, books and ideas that will get you where you feel you want to be. But somehow some make it, and others don’t. If chance is the core factor, then how much free will do we even have? I like to believe that our free will comes by forcing situations where no matter what the roll of the die is, we make progress. The wings of a butterfly flapping may cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, but maybe it had the free will to choose which direction to flap to.
The other day, there was a big tree that fell after strong winds in a park with hundreds similar trees. It got me curious as to how the wind could be strong enough to fell just one tree. Was there something random that caused the wind to be significantly stronger in that specific spot. Were the roots weak due to illness, or maybe they just grew closer to the ground level and were less stable. Sometimes, no matter how strong your core is, a combination of bad luck can topple you when everyone else around you stays strong. Unlike trees, we can sometimes stand up and fight another day, but the aim is not to fight against the unstoppable force of chance. It is to use it to your advantage.
I sometimes like to flip a coin when I cannot decide between two events, no matter how serious they may be. Allows me to call it fate and become an observer rather than the decision maker which makes it more thrilling. What I do try and ensure is that no matter how that coin lands, the decision will make it more probable that my life improves. A simple example is this. If I wanted to invest £10k, I can flip a coin whether to buy stock A or stock B but I would never flip a coin on whether I should put it in red or black on the casino table. Because while roulette is a game of a chance, it is certain that you are in a disadvantaged position. With stocks, even if the game is rigged, you may get lucky and be part of the team that has the advantage.
