Brian Klaas

There is a film from the 1990s called Sliding Doors, which is starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

And it's got this – basically two versions of this woman's life, one in which she makes the tube train, the subway train, and one in which she misses it.

And she has no idea.

It's a split second basically that shifts her life.

And her world turns out radically differently.

And I think this idea is really important that it's not just that our trajectories through careers and families and who we meet and who we spend our lives with and so on can be swayed by little tiny changes.

It's also that there's all these invisible pivots that we're totally oblivious to.

Those sliding doors moments.

Or for me, I didn't know about this mass murder that ended up producing my existence until I was in my mid-20s.

I mean, I was totally blind to this.

And it's obviously a very important part of my origin story.

But I was ignorant of it.

How many other things am I ignorant of about the pathway of my life?

I mean, it's an infinite number.

So I think that gives you a healthy appreciation for it.

And it also makes you less likely to fully blame yourself when you fail and more likely to not fully take credit when you succeed, which I think are important ideas because we are in this sort of interconnected world where

We only have so much control, and yet I think a lot of the messages we get are that, oh, if you fail, it's because you screwed up 100% of the time.

And if you succeed, it's because you were brilliant 100% of the time.

A world driven by chance and chaos allows for a lot less of that straight black and white mentality.

Yeah, so I think that's true to a certain extent, but the experimentation point I made before, I'll elaborate on a little bit more.