Dealing with chance in life
I was talking to someone I know who is a regular poker player, and he was telling me about a mathematical concept that is very popular with poker players, the concept of variance, which is the dispersion of results over the arithmetic mean of this result, and that can be more easily understood with an example, suppose you flip a coin, there is a 50% chance that it will come up heads or tails, if we were to flip the coin ten times, in theory, we should get five times heads and five times tails, but in practice the results are usually dispersed with respect to the mean and we can obtain results as disparate as eight times heads and twice tails, this dispersion is what is known as variance, the randomness in the results that differs from what is probabilistically expected. In poker this applies when a player, in a short period of time, can play several hands in a row, having very good cards and making the best decisions, but still end up losing simply by chance, in this way a lousy player can beat even the best in the world simply by variance. Poker players are then advised to accept those defeats as something that can happen, and to continue playing with the hands that are most likely to win, because in the long run, the effects of chance and variance are lessened, and players more skilled end up winning, despite having a rough patch in the short term.
As I am not a constant poker player I did not give importance to these tips until, after a closer observation, I realized that they have a real application in daily life. It turns out that this attitude that is taken by poker players is a good way to deal with the inevitable randomness of life. Because, whether we like it or not, chance is a big part of our lives, although we would like to have control of everything and be the only ones responsible for the things we do and that happen to us, the reality is that everything is somewhat more complex and there are multiple causes that produce what we finally experience, many of which are not in our control. Chance can cause that, even if we try hard, do everything well and make good decisions, things don't turn out well for us, this is because doing things well does not necessarily mean obtaining good results, there are always variables that we cannot control and that will inevitably end up determining what happens.
This means that many times the difference between failing and succeeding in anything is just a matter of chance and not of doing things right or wrong, we can perform the actions that have the highest probability of producing the desired result, and still fail, the solution for these occasions is to do the same thing that poker players do, be persistent, although we can fail in the short term by simple chance, if we are persistent, the variance decreases and the good decisions we make will eventually pay off. It is about accepting defeat as something inevitable, temporary, and not definitive, for what we have to go through, and detaching ourselves from the results we obtain. In the end, it is about judging the things we do for themselves and not for their consequences, we can strive and do everything possible, but in the end, let everything take its course, giving up the results and any expectations.
Perseverance is the best way to deal with chance and the setbacks of fate, although we may have some falls from time to time, in the long term we will end up winning if we take care of doing the right thing.
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