Reconciling Ourselves with Contingency's Roulette Wheel

I once worked with a gentleman who wrote, maintained, and regularly revised a detailed five-year plan that he used to set his goals and prescribe his professional development. I applauded his ambition and commitment, but I had doubts about the practicality of such an elaborate career-mapping exercise.

My demurrals weren’t based on a bitter aversion to personal ambition. In my view, anything that gets somebody out of bed and charging into the madness of daily commutes and office politics can’t be entirely bad. Instead, my concern about such detailed planning is that it will inevitably go sideways, and not through any fault attributable to the planner.

We are all subject to . . . well, what should I call it? I suppose I could call it serendipity, but that has a purely positive connotation. I might call it fate, but that has a darker, supernatural overtones. Let’s opt for a dispassionate, technical descriptors. I will call these uncontrollable, unpredictable events exogenous factors. Regardless of whether they lead to happy or unhappy destinations or results, they divert or deflect us from our intended course.

It is solipsistic for any one of us to believe that we, on our own, decide what does and doesn’t happen to us in our lives. Nobody decides to get hit by a car or a train — unless they’re trying to commit suicide or running an insurance scam — but people get hit by cars and trains every day somewhere in this world. (Brief digression: In the mean streets where I grew up, I actually knew a guy who would intentionally throw himself in front of slow-moving vehicles to collect money from lawsuits and insurance settlements. After a while, though, the form book revealed what he was doing. You can get hit by a car once, maybe twice, but three times suggest an anomalous pattern. He eventually spent time in a facility dedicated to his rehabilitation.)

Similarly, one doesn’t decide to intentionally throw oneself down the stairs, but there’s a small chance you might fall any time you descend a flight of steps. A former bass player in the Kinks died in such circumstances.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I’ve picked only two examples, but perhaps you will agree when I see the contingencies that might befall us, on any given day, are practically endless. Of course, good things can and do happen, too. You meet people by chance who become lifelong friends; you stumble into business or career opportunities when you least expect to come across them; you find employment with a company that experiences phenomenal growth and attains a lucrative exit that allows you to pay off all your debts and buy a house.

My point is not that bad things happen. Good things happen, too. My point is that we should be fully cognizant of the fact that we rarely, if ever, have full control over when, how, where, or why these momentous events occur.

A news item published earlier today, a relatively minor story in the context of the dramas now roiling the globe, provides a helpful example for further exploration of today’s theme. Reuters reported that Heineken announced that it had lost operational control, and subsequently withdrew its employees, from its facilities in conflict-affected areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A long-running insurgency has done more than threaten and scupper the operational continuity of breweries, but if you’re in the beer business, it’s a big deal. From the Reuters article:

The group owns four breweries in Congo, producing Heineken beer as well as other popular brands like Primus and Amstel. The Bukavu facilities employed around 1,000 people both directly and indirectly, it had said previously.
"Our top priority is the safety and well-being of our employees," its Friday statement said. "We have withdrawn all remaining staff from these sites and we have continued to support them financially."
Nearly 14% of Heineken's total revenues come from its businesses in the Middle East and Africa, where Congo, with its population of over 100 million, is a large market.
Its operations in the cities of Goma, Bukavu, and Uvira had together previously accounted for roughly a third of Heineken's business in the Congo.

No Plan Can Account for the Unaccountable

This is not something you can envision on a five-year plan. If you attempted to predict such an event, even presuming you possessed otherworldly prescience, people would not believe you. Imagine communicating the following scenario to a corporate board: “In five years, we’ll have to close our brewing facilities for an indefinite period in the Democratic Republic of the Congo because of an acute and protracted insurgency led by the M23 rebel forces. We should proactively make allowances for this forthcoming disruption to our business continuity in the African market.” Years ago, people would look askance at you, while today they’d give you the side-eye.

I’ve used a relatively mild example, not a horrific or sensational one. I think we’ve all had our fill of horror and sensation, especially if you spend any time scrolling through the digital detritus on X, formerly Twitter.

I am not trying to dissuade you from having and making plans, from setting goals, and pursuing them enthusiastically. I just want to remind you that you’re not in complete control of what happens in your life. As I typed the words in the preceding sentence, I thought immediately that they were so unforgivably banal and trite as to be unnecessary. Unfortunately, they probably aren’t gratuitous, if only because the online world is filled with grifting influencers and ersatz life coaches who strongly advise that you are an omnipotent agent of your destiny. Incredibly, they earn money for such bullshit.

The fact is, you can adhere to your plan and do almost everything right, and yet fall short of your goals because of factors beyond your control. Similarly, you can make mistakes, even quite a few of them, and succeed if serendipity, circumstances, timing, and the right people are on your side.

I’ve known and worked with people of both sides of that divide. Some of those who didn’t achieve their own ambitious expectations beat themselves up over what they perceived as their personal or professional shortcomings. Conversely, others interpreted their success as evidence of their uncanny acumen and personal and professional superiority. On both sides, those who fell short of their goals and those who met or surpassed them, there was an incapacity to understand the inherently unpredictable context in which we all live and interact with each other. Egotism and hubris, if allowed to do their worst, can blind and deceive, preventing us from clearly seeing the extent of our capabilities and talents as well as the limitations of our knowledge and skills.

It’s fashionable these days to denounce humility and modesty as attributes of the meek and weak. That’s unfortunate. Humility precedes a true understanding of what’s possible — and what isn’t — in our contingent and mortal lives.