The Cosmic Balance of Luck

The most unpredictable input in your life is what other people do.

You can control so much of your own actions with discipline and mindfulness. The biggest “wild card” is how other people behave. For example, people often talk about how certain demographic factors in your life, such as race, gender, or even height can have a profound impact on how your life plays out. Dwarfing them all, however, is simply whether or not the people who raised you were good, noble people. Nothing else comes close to the advantage or disadvantage that gives you. And you had zero control over it. From your perspective, it was all luck.

Smaller versions of this play out everywhere. You can be an exceptional worker but a new manager comes in who is absolutely terrible, and you had no control over that. You can be a great partner but it turns out the person you were initially attracted to becomes a lunatic. Sure, in both of those situations you can exercise some control and leave, but even if you do there’s damage done along the way.

So the biggest source of randomness and uncertainty in your life comes from other people. But in a great sense of cosmic justice, that means you have a tremendous amount of control over other people’s fortunes.

You can be an amazing parent, leader, or partner. You can be kind to strangers. You can put the shopping cart back. In other words, you can be the reason that someone else’s luck is very, very good. No matter what cards were dealt to you, you can be the pocket aces for someone else.