(The Luck We’re Given and the Luck We Create)

Ultimate Luck

Let’s do some fun maths: What is the probability of us, as Homo sapiens, being born in this world based on basic biological and historical estimates?

• Average sperm count per ejaculation: about 250 million
• The probability of one sperm fertilising the egg: 1 in 250 million

It is a biological lottery. For that sperm to win, our parents had to meet. Going back in time, their parents had to meet too.

• Assume 25 years per generation
• About 200,000 years from the beginning of modern humans
• Number of generations: 200,000 / 25 = 8,000

8,000 generations had to line up for us to be born. A rough version of this probability would be (1/250 million) raised to the power of 8,000 generations, which results in an unimaginably small number. Our existence is the result of a statistical miracle so large it is almost impossible to calculate. If even one of our ancestors had turned left instead of right 1,000 years ago, or if a different sperm had won 100 generations back, “we” would not exist. A different person would be here instead.

Depending on which interpretation gives us comfort, we call this event “luck” or “fate.” At a personal level, this gives us both a feeling of being special and a coping mechanism. Psychologically, we might call this ultimate luck—because we didn’t do anything to win this race. It is a way of acknowledging that the odds were billions-to-one against us, yet here we are. Fate views our birth as a necessary part of a cosmic plan or destiny. We were “meant” to be born here for a specific reason or purpose.

If we zoom out, based on UN data, 4.2 births occur every second in our world—about 132 million births every year. Birth is not a special event to nature. From a scientific perspective, our birth is random—a gigantic fluke among infinite possibilities. A random outlier.

We attribute events in our lives—good or bad—to luck or fate. Offers and rejections, being delayed for a visa interview due to a traffic jam, accidents, illness, loss of family members, a windfall in the stock market, surviving a disaster, a fast or slow career path. Again, if we take a 10,000-foot view, these things keep happening every day among the population. The world is too chaotic for us to perceive any clear order in how it works.

Is our birth luck, fate, or a random event? Understanding the unpredictability and randomness of our world will help us cope with events in our lives. That understanding may not remove suffering, but it can help us respond with more humility.

But birth is only one form of luck; randomness keeps shaping our lives long after we are born, until we die. To make this clearer, it helps to categorize luck into a few types.

Luck: Success or Failure by Chance

Luck refers to specific events that happen by chance, rather than purely through our own actions. We can control only our actions, not the outcome. The decision to buy a lottery ticket is ours. But winning the lottery is luck—it happens through pure chance. It is a random occurrence. Preparing hard for an interview and doing our best is under our control. Whether the interview results in an offer depends partly on luck. The action is ours, and it is necessary. But the outcome remains uncertain.

Luck at Birth

Not every outcome depends on our action. We don’t control where we are born, the family into which we are born, or our genetic makeup. Being born in the developed world or the developing world, in a democracy or a dictatorial regime, in a war-torn region, into a rich or poor family, or in an urban or rural setting is not in our hands. The same applies to being born with good or bad genes. These are called “luck at birth” or constitutive luck—the luck built into our starting position.

Circumstantial Luck

A person may appear “good” as long as their values are not tested. Unless we face situations that test our character, we will never know our true values—whether we stick to the principles we claim to hold. A homeowner who claims she does not discriminate based on caste or religion while renting out property will get tested only when she comes across a person from a different community, region, or dietary background asking to rent the property.

Driver A, in a moment of inattention, runs a red light as a child is crossing the street, cannot avoid hitting the child, and the child dies. Driver B also runs the red light, but no one is crossing the intersection at that time. As a bystander, if we are asked to morally evaluate drivers A and B, we may assign Driver A more moral blame than Driver B because Driver A’s course of action resulted in a death. There is no difference in their actions. The only disparity is in the external event. Driver B should be blamed equally, but got lucky. In that sense, we may be lucky or unlucky in the situations we happen to face.

Luck Through Action

Luck also appears in how our actions turn out. Two people leave for work at the same time—one gets stuck in a traffic jam while the other reaches work on time. We make investments but not every investment performs as expected. At work, not every project we work on reaches the end as planned—some succeed as planned, a few perform better than expected in the market, and some get dropped halfway because the market changes. An interesting observation here is that the more actions we take, the more collisions with luck we create.

Luck Through Awareness

While taking action, being aware and observant increases the surface area for luck. A scientist conducting an experiment may spot a strange pattern that results in a discovery that was not intended. It could also mean noticing opportunities others miss while conducting market research.

Luck Through Uniqueness

What is common among King Kong, the Rise of the Planet of the Apes series, The Lord of the Rings, and the Tintin movies? The actor Andy Serkis. He is the actor behind King Kong, Caesar, Gollum, and Captain Haddock. He acted as a bridge between human acting and digital characters. His background is in physical theatre and visual arts. This combination made him uniquely qualified to understand how the human body must move to “read” correctly as a gorilla, an ape, or Gollum. Opportunities came to him because he was one of the few who could do it at such a high level. This is luck that seeks us out because of our unique mix of skills and reputation.

Luck explains outcomes after they happen; fate suggests they were meant to happen.

Fate: A Predetermined Path

Fate is the belief that events are already decided by a supernatural power or the universe and are inevitable, regardless of our choices. Unlike luck, which feels random, fate implies a hidden plan or purpose. We get stuck in a traffic jam, pull over, walk into a coffee shop, and end up meeting our future employer who happens to be the CEO of a startup. We miss the flight, have to wait at the airport, and end up meeting our future spouse. Bumping into the CEO or meeting the future spouse are random occurrences. Most visits to coffee shops are mundane—nothing happens other than coffee, and not everyone who goes to a coffee shop ends up meeting their future spouse. Our brain finds it hard to accept such events as random chance. So we frame it as a divine plan or fate: the traffic jam or missed flight was meant to happen so “we could meet the one.”

Randomness removes both comfort and intention from the picture.

Randomness: The Absence of a Pattern

Randomness simply means events can occur without a predictable pattern or purpose. It is impersonal. Unlike luck or fate, randomness does not care whom it affects. We get stuck in a traffic jam; missing the train or the bus is a random event. A coin landing on “heads” ten times in a row is random. Getting a flat tyre or winning a lottery is a random event. There is no “luck” or “plan” involved—it is simply one possible outcome of a series of independent, chance events. Not everyone who has a unique or eccentric set of skills gets a breakthrough.

Our brain accepts randomness when flipping a coin. But when it comes to life events, our brain struggles to accept it as “just random” because randomness feels meaningless and frightening. We want to make sense of the chaos of luck and randomness.

The difficulty is not randomness itself, but our need to explain it.

Reasoning Through the Chaos

Psychologists view fate as a cognitive coping mechanism. We are “pattern-seeking” creatures. When a highly improbable or life-altering event happens, our brains struggle to accept it as random. We use luck and fate as narrative tools to translate randomness into something human. The universe is indifferent, but we humans are meaning-making machines. Why do we struggle with randomness? This discomfort usually shows up in three ways.

• The Narrative Instinct: Our brains are wired to tell stories. Randomness is the absence of a story—it is just noise. We create stories to give events gravity. Believing something was “meant to be” provides a sense of order and purpose.
• The Illusion of Control: Pure randomness can feel terrifying because it suggests we are never truly safe. Attributing events to fate and luck protects mental health by giving painful or surprising events a larger explanation. The concepts of fate and luck provide a safety net—accepting that a tragic accident or stock market windfall is 100% purposeless makes the world feel chaotic and unmanageable.
• Moral Justification: Fate helps explain away inequalities. If someone is incredibly wealthy or incredibly poor, it is because of their destiny or fate or karma—without considering the starting position, privilege, access, etc. It provides a way to label privilege or disadvantage. This gives inequality a moral explanation, even when chance and social structures also played a large role.

In short, luck and fate are the narrative ideas we have invented to make sense of the random universe. Without them, the world can feel like a series of coin tosses. With them, it feels like a journey.

The realization that life is shaped by a sequence of random events is a double-edged sword. Whether that realization feels empowering or crushing depends on which side of the coin we choose to look at.

Disempowering — The Weight of Indifference

Randomness is impersonal—it does not differentiate between humans and other species, or among humans. Life can look meaningless when it appears to have no larger purpose. When something terrible happens, randomness offers no comfort. There is no lesson to be learned and no “reason” for the pain. It can also make our achievements feel less deserved—we achieved it not because we are destined for greatness but because we are the beneficiaries of a series of favours lining up in a row—like getting ten consecutive heads in a coin toss.

Empowering — The Freedom of the Blank Slate

On the other hand, realising that the universe is random and has no inherent purpose can be more empowering. We are not characters in a pre-written script. Instead, we are offered a clean slate. We have the agency to make our own purpose. We don’t have to look at failures as our fate—as if the universe decided we aren’t meant for success. It is just a bad roll of the dice, which means we can roll again. In a random world, persistence matters. We can increase our chances of luck or success by taking more shots. Seen this way, as long as we have access to opportunities, we can create our own luck through action and swing randomness in our favour.

The healthiest position may be somewhere between helplessness and overconfidence.

The Middle Ground

Accepting that randomness exists makes us stay humble and realistic. At the same time, it gives us the agency to act and increase the odds of a successful outcome. We don’t have control over constitutive luck—our birth. But we are responsible for how we play the hand we are dealt. As the saying goes, “We can’t control the wind, but we can adjust our sails.” By continuing to play, we increase our surface area for luck. For a deeper discussion, see my earlier blog on Hard Work–Privilege–Luck–Myth of Merit.

This idea becomes more practical when we think of luck probabilistically.

The Math of Increasing Our Odds

If we view luck as probability rather than a mysterious force, we can tilt the odds in our favour.

• Keep trying and stay in the game: If a lucky break has a 5% chance of occurring, the person who tries a hundred times is statistically much more likely to succeed, while the person who tries twice is more likely to conclude they are “unlucky.” This is similar to deliberate practice, which I discussed in my post Practice vs Deliberate Practice.
• Keep the cost of failure low: We have to stay in the game, which means we must ensure that our “tries” don’t bankrupt us financially or emotionally. This allows us to keep playing until chance swings in our favour.
• Build a talent stack: Combine skills with hard work. It is hard to be the number one in the world at one specific thing, but it is much easier to be in the top ten percent at three or four different things that don’t overlap. A VLSI designer who also has AI and machine-learning expertise and a product-management skill set can become a highly sought-after person by start-ups and corporations. A software programmer who also understands intellectual-property and tax laws is positioned like a magnet for luck—luck by uniqueness. That kind of uniqueness cannot easily be copied.

This is where the Stoic archer metaphor becomes useful.

The Stoic Archer Metaphor

Ancient Stoic philosophers used the image of an archer to describe what success meant.

• The archer can choose the right bow.
• They can practise their aim for years.
• They can pull the string with perfect tension.
• But the moment the arrow leaves the bow, it belongs to the wind (randomness).

For the Stoics, the archer’s “success” is not hitting the target; it’s the excellence of the shot itself. If a gust of wind blows the arrow off course, the archer can be at peace because they did everything within their power correctly.

In the end, the goal is not to defeat randomness, but to live well within it.

A Fine Balance

So the practical answer is neither fatalism nor denial, but balance. We did not choose the lottery of birth, and we cannot command the winds of randomness. But we can choose the quality of our actions, the will to keep trying, and the meaning we create from the life we have been given. Even if the universe has not assigned inherent meaning or purpose, the fact that we are here at all is a wonderful, lucky break.

We are free because there is no pre-written script; we are free to explore. We are responsible because this improbable life should not be wasted. And we can be grateful because, against impossible odds, we are here at all.

In the end, maybe that is enough: act well, stay humble, and honour the luck that brought us here.