Luck has played an outsized role in my life. Two notable examples: 1. In 1992 I learned that a colleague of mine was a member of the Magic Castle [1] and off

Luck has played an outsized role in my life. Two notable examples: 1. In 1992 I learned that a colleague of mine was a member of the Magic Castle [1] and offered me a guest pass. I had a long-standing love of magic, and the chance to go to the Castle seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I invited some friends to go with me, and one of those friends asked if she could bring a friend, and of course I said yes. Fast-forward 30 years and that friend-of-a-friend and I just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Castle 2. In early 2000, at the height of the dotcom boom, I sent a resume to an obscure little startup with about 50 employees. They made me an offer, but I turned them down because I decided that it was not worth giving up my secure position at NASA to go chasing a pipe dream. But they wouldn't take no for an answer. They offered me all kinds of additional perks (back then anyone with a CS degree and a pulse could pretty much write their own ticket) and so I decided to go. Four years later that company had an IPO. Their stock symbol was GOOG. [UPDATE] Two more examples that I just thought of, with a somewhat different dynamic: 3. When I was in high school I attended a football game. I drove myself in my parents' car. At the game, I met my best friend at the time (who has since died from complications resulting from malaria, but that's another story) who had arrived on a motorcycle. After the game we decided to go meet somewhere (I don't recall exactly where). I followed him. At one point he was stopped at a stop sign. I expected him to pull away from the intersection fairly quickly and I didn't want to lose him, so I stepped on the gas. By the time I realized that he wasn't pulling away as I expected it was almost too late to stop. I screeched to a halt (this was before ABS brakes) with my front bumper about a foot away from his rear wheel. If I had reacted even a second later I almost certainly would have hit him, and quite possibly killed him. 4. After college some friends and I went on a tour of Europe. We rented a car in England and picked up two girls so there were five of us in the car along with our backpacks. One of my friends was driving, and I was in the passenger seat. We were going at speed down a non-divided highway when I saw my friend turn his head to say something to one of the girls in the back seat. The car started drifting into oncoming traffic, which in England of course is on the right. We were heading straight for a semi-truck. In a split my brain decided that telling him to look out might be a bad idea because, as an American driver, his reflex reaction would be to turn the wheel to the right instead of left. So I grabbed the wheel myself and turned to the left. My friend of course did not know realize right away why I had done this. He thought I had just gone rogue, looked at me instead of out the window, and gave my hand a karate chop to get me to let go of the wheel. He never saw the truck. To this day I'm not sure I did the right thing. But we didn't hit the truck.