Luck Versus Control

I recently finished reading Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win and cannot recommend it enough. Of course, the book is about more than just poker: Konnikova describes her journey from novice to professional, and, more importantly, the lessons she learned along the way from the legendary Erik Seidel and from herself. Even if you, like me, do not understand poker, this book is worth a read.

Konnikova has accomplished much, not even considering her poker feats. When Anna was only four years old, her family emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States, where she earned a slew of prestigious degrees, including a PhD in psychology from Columbia University, and is currently a writer and journalist.

While Konnikova’s biography is interesting, her reflections on it are even more so. I still ruminate on an excerpt from the opening pages of The Biggest Bluff:

The struggle for balance on the spectrum of luck and control in the lives we lead, and the decisions we make, is one I have been grappling with for many years. As a child, I had perhaps the greatest luck of my life: my parents left the Soviet Union, opening to me a world of opportunity I would never otherwise have had. As a teen, I used every ounce of skill I had to excel academically and become part of the first generation in my family to make it to college in the United States. As an adult, I wanted to disentangle just how much of where I’d ended up had been my own doing as opposed to a twist of fate – like so many before me, I wanted to know how much of my life I could take credit for and how much was just stupid luck. In All Said and Done, Simone de Beauvoir says of her life that the ‘penetration of that particular ovum by that particular spermatozoon, with its implications of the meeting of my parents and before that of their birth and the births of all their forebears, had not one chance in hundreds of millions of coming about.’ Such was the role that chance had played in the trajectory of her existence. ‘And it was chance, a chance quite unpredictable in the present state of science, that caused me to be born a woman. From that point on, it seems to me that a thousand different futures might have stemmed from every single movement of my past: I might have fallen ill and broken off my studies; I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.’ How could you ever hope to separate the random from the intentional?

Though I do not dismiss her talent and diligence, Konnikova likely would not be in her current situation had her parents never emigrated at all let alone to the United States. My life, too, would differ dramatically had I remained in Russia. Why did it so happen that America plucked me, rather than the other hundreds of thousands of children in the same state-run orphanage system, from my birthplace? Why did I not end up like the millions of street children sniffing glue and begging for food? What are the chances that my biological parents could have created a child whose life differs so much from theirs?

If the unthinkable never happened, I would not be typing this blog post from my cozy St. Louis apartment. I would maybe not even speak any English. I would have never met my best friend or any of the other people so dear to me. Maybe I would not even be alive.

I like to think I have more of an internal locus of control rather than an external one. Yet I do not feel that cosmic nihilism is entirely at odds with that. I am starting to not only appreciate how randomness and chance have orchestrated my life – even in ways beyond my primary example – but also understand why I gravitate toward hobbies that reward effort and involve little to no randomness.

A quote from Infinite Jest comes to mind:

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

Chance has dealt many people an interesting deck of cards that propelled them to some position that means simultaneously everything and nothing. See Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech. My biggest struggle is unraveling what is fate and what is my own doing. That’s nothing new, though I love how Konnikova expressed this feeling. But maybe it doesn’t have to be a struggle. Maybe I don’t have to care or feel special about it. Maybe I can accept it and move on.