On luck
Reflections on chance, support, and the debts that can only be paid forward
“I am because we are.” — Ubuntu proverb
When I look back on my life, I find that the extraordinary, selfless support of countless individuals and astonishing good luck have played a large part in it.
People often celebrate the “self-made” individual — the one who works evenings and weekends, misses vacations, and wills their success into existence. While it is absolutely true that immense effort on one’s own part is necessary to realize a goal, becoming too immersed in the idea of “self-made” success can lead us to accidentally lose sight of how profoundly conditional our lives are on the support of the people around us.
Beautifully, many such people never seem to think of what they do as extraordinary. To them, it is simply a way of life. I think of my seventh-grade math teacher, who stayed with me after school until five in the afternoon, multiple days a week for several months, to help me get up to speed with algebra. I think of my research mentor, who, if I ask, will Zoom call with me even on evenings and weekends to help me practice a presentation.
Some of these moments of generosity were quiet — a desk lamp lent by a floormate for every one of my medical school interview Zoom calls, friends in New Jersey who offer rides before I even have to ask because they know I will need one, friends who pick up the phone even when they’re busy. Others were more unexpected.
During my MISTI India internship, a medical student I was working alongside noticed that I had been unenthusiastic about what I was eating for lunch. When they learned the reason — that I was too nervous to cross the chaotic streets of Bangalore, which operate with nearly no enforced traffic regulations — they immediately stopped what they were doing and walked me across the street. My high school science teacher let me run experiments in her classroom any day, all day, without a second thought. My Course 6 suitemates stayed up until midnight to fix my laptop, which unexpectedly stopped working the night before I had to leave town for a medical school visit, despite both of them having exams the next day. The Tech welcomed me and let me write even though I arrived, rather late to the game, in my senior spring. At Addir, MIT’s interfaith dialogue program, my peers sat with me in the middle of the night when I unexpectedly fell ill during our retreat at Cape Cod.
And where do I even begin with my family, neighborhood, and community?
As much as my ego may want to indulge the thought that I am “self-made,” realizing how much my life has not only benefited from but is genuinely contingent upon so many other people and communities is deeply humbling. And yet, even this doesn’t tell the whole story.
Alongside the support of others runs another powerful force: luck. I think about every application I submitted — the way someone on the other end happened to read it on a day it resonated with them and there happened to be a spot that hadn’t yet been filled. Every time I showed up to exams and found problems I could actually solve — knowing full well that on another day, with a different set of questions or with a less clear mind, the outcome might have looked very different. The random housing lottery that placed me with not only a great roommate and friend, but someone I could look up to and be inspired by — a small administrative coin flip with tremendous effects on my college experience and life. The experiments I ran that yielded meaningful findings, when so many didn’t. The mentors I landed with by chance, whose guidance shaped me in ways I am still discovering. While luck often only becomes possible and meaningful when met with effort and dedication, when I look back, it is impossible to deny how large a role chance plays in how our lives unfold.
I raise all of this not to place responsibility on others or luck, nor to lift the weight from our own shoulders. Rather, I’ve noticed that sitting with these realizations can be useful. First, recognizing how contingent my life is on others and on luck cultivates humility. Second, it offers a kind of clarity — a reminder that there are almost always external forces that must align for an outcome to be possible. Applied to success, this keeps the ego in check. Applied to failure, it can keep self-esteem from collapsing. While failure almost always holds lessons about what we can do differently in the future, knowing that luck is part of the equation can help us keep rolling with life’s challenges in a more bearable way.
Finally, there is something beautiful about recognizing the roles others play in our lives, because there is sometimes very little I can do to pay back the people who helped me — not directly, anyway. My seventh-grade math teacher who stayed after school multiple times a week for several months to work through algebra with me needs very little from me now. I have written cards to him and visited his classroom. But there is no apparent way to repay, in kind, what he gave me.
If I can’t pay it back, the next option is to pay it forward — to give to others what was given to me, even if not to the same people. There is something peaceful and gratifying in this act of kindness: the sense of returning to the world the generosity that was once extended to you. There is also a fleeting glimpse of self-transcendence in the act of giving without expectation of return — a dissolution of the boundary between self and other — that many seek. Finally, there is something simply beautiful in the realization that, sometimes, the only way to pay it back is by paying it forward.
I wonder, too, whether for many of the people who help us along the way, the only repayment they ever seek is for us to do the same for someone else.