On Luck, Part 2

Yesterday we discussed why successful people actually consider themselves lucky (not because random events tend to directly benefit them, but because they find ways to exploit the random events, good or bad, that they do encounter).

With this philosophy in mind, we shouldn’t overlook how lucky we actually are:

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.

Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves

HT: Brainpickings