I've been downplaying the role of words like 'luck','fate', 'chance', 'fortune' all my life. I always thought of them as something I would not associate with my successes or failures. Recently I saw a youtube clip of Harsha Bhogle about it in which he mentioned people start believing in these things more and more as they grow older. He couldn't have been more right.
Most of the times, bad luck or misfortune can be wiped away by getting around it. A small inconvenience and pinch of hardwork will brush it aside. But I've learn't that's not always the case. Although the decisions we make are the biggest contributors to our destiny, we have to understand that there still are awful amount of things are beyond our control.
We can buy a property at one of the most lucrative places and yet there is no guarantee that there is a price surge in the next couple of years. Agreed we have a lot of choices to make in most of our decisions and we could make our lives a whole lot better by making good choices. The same way bad choices can take us downhill. But not every bad choice will. If we ask ourselves, I am sure everybody will have gotten away with making bad choices every once in a while.
Although, I have started to come to terms with luck, it still is unpredictable. You cannot base your decisions based on it being in your side. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle also applies to real life. The difference being that uncertainty is not a constant here, it's a variable. It affects some more than others. You cannot estimate it and try to tame it. Buying a car on a Tuesday or getting your name changed to certain numeric addition is not going to change it. Even if it does, you would never know what would have happened if you did not.
I would like to end this post by a Donald Rumsfeld quote.
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.
