How much of success is determined by luck?
My answer: Pretty much 100%.
On Father’s Day this year, my 13-year-old daughter Lily told me she was afraid of dying. She didn’t like to think about it, but when she did, she said it was really scary for her. She wasn’t afraid that it would hurt to die, but just that she would suddenly be gone, and she wasn’t sure if she’d ever live again or see any of us again. You might think young kids are oblivious to topics like death, but they’re often more observant than they lead on.
This prompted us to look up how infinitesimal the odds were of our even being alive. According to Dr. Ali Binazir—an MD with a master’s in philosophy, the odds of being here are 1 x 10 ^ 2.7 million. That’s a 1 with 2.7 million zeros after it. His calculation was based on the odds of you being conceived which is also contingent on your parents, grandparents, and every one of your great-great ancestors also being conceived. His math didn’t take into account the even crazier odds that, with the 200 sextillion (billion trillion) stars in the universe, we happen to be on a planet that just happens to be just the right distance from the sun to allow just the right amount of heat, that our planet has the right amount of oxygen and has an ozone layer burns off most things that would destroy the Earth.
(As a side note, as I am writing this, only minutes ago I had been getting really frustrated because the Wi-Fi on my plane wasn’t working. Seems like a small problem in the grand scheme of the universe!)
How long would it take you to draw another “lottery card” if your card were to come up again in 1x10 ^ 27 million tries. Here is some math I ran…
Imagine that you drew a card every second for a full 76-year lifetime, and at the end of that lifetime, you took a single grain of sand from the beach. Then you restarted and drew a card every second for another full lifetime, and then took a second second grain of sand from the beach. You repeated this process until all sand was removed from all the beaches in the world. At that point, you took a single thimble of water from the ocean. And then you put all the sand back on all the beaches and started all over again, removing a single grain of sand every lifetime until all the sand was removed a second time, you then removed a second thimble of water from the ocean. You repeated this process until you had drained all the oceans on Earth. At that point, you removed a single blade of grass from the Earth. And then you put back all the water and all of the sand and started again. And when you were done removing all the sand, then all the water, then all the grass, you started over again and repeated that entire process about 30 more times. And then, at the end of all of that, your lottery card would be drawn a second time. Nevermind that the sun would have burnt out long before you even came close to removing a small fraction of the Earth’s sand on your very first iteration.
Now pick out your favorite people in your life: your partner, friends, children, parents, siblings, teachers, colleagues. Their odds of being alive are equally small, and the odds that you and any of them share the same lifetime rounds to zero. Even if you were to pull another lottery card, there is virtually no chance you would see any of them again.
At the end of his famous podcast, “How I Built This,” Guy Raz asks a single common question to all his guests, “How much of your success is luck?” The guests have various answers, but most common are some variations of “You make your own luck,” or “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
I think my answer to Guy’s question has to be that any success I’ve had rounds to 100% luck. Being born at all is luck. Being born in the U.S is luck. Having all my mental faculties is luck. Being here now is luck. Haven’t we all already won the most amazing, lowest odds, highest payout mega-jackpot lottery in the history of the universe? And isn’t that the ultimate luck?
Why am I writing this? Well, what if all of this was not just a random series of events, but rather each of us is here for a reason? Whether we owe our existence to a higher power, or the universe, or purely ridiculous odds, we were born here now. And maybe there is something greater and more important in this world. And maybe if I take my mind off the plane’s broken Wi-Fi and zoom out, I’ll be able to approach my life with much more gratitude and approach my interactions with more grace. Maybe whatever is stressing me out right this second isn’t as important as I thought it was. Maybe, since I’m already clearly playing with house money, I have nothing to lose.
“What if all of this was not just a random series of events, but rather each of us is here for a reason? Whether we owe our existence to a higher power, or the universe, or purely ridiculous odds, we were born here now. And maybe there is something greater and more important in this world.”
Maybe it is justifiable that my daughter is afraid of dying. Maybe deep down, we all recognize how fragile our existence is, how short it is, how much we have to play for, and how ridiculously unlikely it is to happen again.
I hope you’re living the life you want to live. As Confucius said, “We all have two lives. And the second one begins when we realize we only have one.”