Book: “The Circle of Influence” – focus on what you can control
When I was a kid, our bookshelf had a collection of stories about famous scientists. That’s how I found out that loads of great inventions started by accident: Fleming and penicillin, Röntgen and X-rays, Nobel and dynamite, and further back, Archimedes and his bathtub, and Newton and the apple that fell on his head.
More than once I wondered, “How did they get so lucky?”
As I got older, the question changed: “Why did the apple pick Newton’s head instead of some ordinary person’s?” That one’s much easier to answer than the first: apples fall on ordinary people’s heads all the time.
Which led me to another question: “What if that dish of Penicillium notatum had ended up with a housekeeper? What if a bricklayer came home after a long day, sank into the bathtub and watched the water spill over? Would they have discovered penicillin, or Archimedes’ principle?”
Probably not.
Luck doesn’t only come to scientists. It comes to everyone, at different times. The thing is, most people don’t notice it, or aren’t ready for it. Scientists aren’t always brilliant or exceptionally gifted, and like most of us, they have no idea when luck will strike. But when it does, they’re ready. They’ve spent months, years, even decades preparing for an opportunity that lasts a split second.
All that preparation also makes luck more likely to find them. Picture a “rain of opportunity” falling evenly over a huge area where everyone lives. Whoever has cleared a bigger patch of land is bound to catch more of it.
So it turns out most of these happy accidents were set up long before they happened.