Let’s talk about the best thing that ever happened to you.
Not the thing you worked for. The other one. The one you still can’t fully explain, and when somebody asks how you got there, you tell a story that sounds like a series of accidents — because it was.
Most people have one. A missed flight. A guy in a queue. A job that came out of a conversation at a braai you almost didn’t go to.
Picture a panel beater in Krugersdorp. 2011, two bays, one bakkie, a wife doing the books at the kitchen table. He’s driving to a wedding in the Free State he doesn’t want to attend. His wife’s cousin. A family obligation, three hours each way, and he’s already worked out what the trip is going to cost him in lost jobs.
Somewhere past Bethlehem the water pump goes.
He spends the weekend in a town he’s never heard of, waiting for a part that arrives on Monday. The farmer whose land he breaks down next to gives him a lift into town. They drink beer while the mechanic works. The farmer runs forty vehicles and has been sending them to Bloemfontein for panel work for years, because nobody closer does it properly.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. Fifteen years of steady work, two more bays, a kid through school — all of it hanging off a water pump that failed at the right kilometre.
Now look at that story the way a systems person looks at it.
An unscheduled stop. A town he had no reason to be in. A stranger with no qualification he could have searched for. Zero targeting, zero funnel, zero attribution. By every metric we now build dashboards for, that weekend was waste.
That’s my worry. Not that the machine gets things wrong. That it gets things right, and the things it’s right about are the things we already knew.
A recommendation engine is a variance-reduction machine. That’s not an insult, it’s the maths. It looks at what you clicked, what people like you clicked, and it hands you the next most likely thing. It is graded on prediction. And luck, by definition, is the thing that wasn’t predicted. So the better these systems get, the more precisely they remove the only mechanism that has ever changed a life sideways.
Route planning does it to your drive. Screening does it to your hiring — the candidate with the strange CV who’d have been the best person you ever hired never makes it to the room, because a filter decided they weren’t the shape you asked for. Matching does it to who you meet. The feed does it to your ideas: you get more of what you already think, which is comfortable, and is also how a person stops having a second thought.
None of it requires anyone to be malicious. Optimisation minimises variance. That’s what the word means. A system that never surprises you is a system working correctly.
Here’s the part that annoys me. The machine didn’t remove surprise. It industrialised it.
The notification. The drop. The limited release. The “just for you” that lands at 21:40 because that’s when you’re most suggestible. That’s not luck. That’s a slot machine with better typography. Engineered surprise, and the tell is that it costs you something and leaves you with nothing you’d have picked with a clear head.
Real luck has a different signature. It costs you first. A wasted weekend. A conversation you didn’t need to have. A yes to a thing that didn’t obviously pay.
If it can be scheduled, it isn’t luck. It’s inventory.
There’s a second-order effect here that I think we’ll be talking about for a decade, and almost nobody has priced it.
Slack is expensive now. A calendar with a hole in it. A drive with no route optimisation and no podcast. A Saturday with nothing on it. The people who can afford unplanned time are the people who already have money, and they’re the ones who keep meeting each other by accident. The person working two jobs with an optimised route between them doesn’t get the wrong turn. They get the fastest path between two places they can’t afford to leave.
Which means luck stops being the thing that redistributes. It becomes an asset class.
And then the ugly one. A lot of luck is unfair. The wrong turn that ruined somebody’s year is the same mechanism as the wrong turn that made somebody’s career. Nobody sensible wants to randomise a court date or a diagnosis. Systems exist to cut variance for good reason — a hospital that runs on chance is a death trap, and anyone arguing otherwise has never sat in a waiting room.
So this isn’t an argument for chaos. It’s an argument about where you spend your certainty. Be brutal where variance is a threat. Leave a gap where variance is the only upside you’ve got left.
Which brings me to what to do with it.
If you run a business, go and count where your last ten clients came from. Not what the CRM says. The actual story. My guess is at least three of them arrived sideways — a referral from somebody you weren’t courting, a conversation at a thing you nearly skipped, a competitor who dropped the ball at the wrong moment.
Now look at your calendar for the next month and see how much room you’ve left for another one of those.
Probably none. Because the calendar fills with the work you already have, and the work you already have came from the gaps you used to leave.
That’s the thing about a pipeline. It’s a filter with your logo on it. Excellent at processing demand you already created, useless at producing the encounter that changes your year. So keep one door that isn’t a funnel. A phone number a human actually answers. A place you’re in every week. A room you host with no agenda and no deck.
And personally — this is the one I have to keep reminding myself about — keep one unoptimised habit. The same café on a Saturday. The same pub. The school car park at three o’clock. The five-a-side that’s been running for nine years and is objectively a waste of a Wednesday evening.
It sounds sentimental. It’s the most reliable luck generator humans have ever built. Not because anything happens there. Because it’s the same place, with the same people, at the same time — and the repetition is what makes the accident possible. You can’t engineer the coincidence. You can only keep showing up where coincidences are allowed to occur.
I’m not against the machine in this. I use the route planner. I let the system find the cheaper flight. I’d rather have a map than get lost in a city I don’t know.
But there’s a difference between using a map and letting somebody else decide which roads exist.
The principle worth keeping is narrow. A person needs the right to an unplanned encounter. Not the right to be safe from randomness — nobody gets that, and the people selling it are selling you a padded room. The right to still be reachable by something you didn’t ask for, in a life that hasn’t been entirely pre-filtered to match the person you were last Tuesday.
You are not a route. You’re a person standing in a street full of doors, and quietly, without anyone announcing it, a machine has decided which ones you’re allowed to walk past.
Leave a gap this week. A real one, in the diary, with nothing in it.
Something has to be able to walk into it.