Brian Klaas

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 it a little bit more.

So there was a brilliant study by some economists where they looked at a strike that was carried out in the London tube network, the London subway.

And basically it forced all these commuters to end up taking a totally different pathway to work, a different commute, right?

When they looked at the anonymized cell phone data of their pathways to work, they found that 5% of the people permanently shifted to the new route, right?

Now, they had thought that they were on the optimal path, the optimal commute, right?

And then they were forced out of it and forced to experiment and they found a better pathway.

And I think this is, again, where that sort of mentality shift of thinking that you have control, thinking that you can therefore optimize, thinking that you know all the answers and so on.

When you start to appreciate the uncertainty and the chance and these sorts of aspects in your life, you play with uncertainty in a way that is, I think, experimentally very, very helpful to you.

And it provides different ideas, which is, you know, it's basically how evolution works too.

It's sort of the sort of evolutionary theory is all about experimentation and mutations happening and so on, solving problems.

So you're right.

I mean, I cannot tell you whether, you know, the snooze button or the sock or whatever it is, the train that you miss is going to produce a better or worse life.

I think it's just important for us not to live the lie that these things are meaningless.

And I think most of us sort of go through the world

Well, I would disagree with the idea that you're powerless.