Much of this post is about me – simply because I’m the subject matter I know best. But I write it as I think it’s universal to almost everyone who reads this. So I’ll bet it applies to you, even if the details of how you got what you got will differ.
I am responsible for probably around 5% of what I have.
And I say that being generous to myself.
And I think if you were really honest with yourself, you’d be the same.
The remaining 95%?
Luck.
I am Palestinian. I could (should?) have been born in Nablus or Jerusalem, where my parents were born. If I was, then the options that I’ve had to go to the university I went to, to do the work that I did, to build what allegedly “I” have built, simply wouldn’t have been there.
But I got that luck because my parents both lost their homes in Palestine, taken from their families in order to build the new state of Israel. If my parents hadn’t lost their homes, hadn’t been exiled, then I would be facing a military onslaught today.
Instead, I’m living comfortably somewhere that there’s near zero risk of me and my family being evicted by someone who believes they have a God-given right to my home.
Luck.
Let alone that I was born a “white” Palestinian. I know through some of the heinous comments I had when I was going into the workforce that it would have been quite different even in the UK had I have been born a “brown” Palestinian.
Heinous comments?
“Attach a picture to your CV in case your prospective employer thinks you’re Pakistani.”
!!!?!!!!?
1980s Britain. Wonderful in so many ways (my luck to have been there). Hideous in many others.
The family of one of my sisters-in-law are Gazan. But they left a few decades ago. The misfortune of not being able to be in their homes is the good fortune that they are not being bombed, starved, maimed today.
This isn’t just about being Palestinian. Luck is a universal factor we underacknowledge.
Your taking an opportunity to build something? That’s the good fortune of having been in an environment where you believed opportunity is something you could take advantage of. More people than any of us could imagine are born and live in families and societies (yes, in the UK too) where they’re made to feel that opportunity isn’t something that is open to them.
So they are conditioned from year dot to not even see it.
Luck.
But surely “you make what you can with the hand you’re given”? I’m a big advocate of this.
But your ability to do that is partly your genetic makeup (which you had nothing to do with), and partly the environment that’s shaped you (which you had limited control over). And a lot in how those two ingredients have been mixed in order to make you who you are.
I don’t say this to belittle you or me. I don’t say it to disempower us from our destinies.
I say it to remind us not to blow smoke up our own backsides.
And mostly, I say it to remind us that we can help create some luck for others who don’t have what we do. And we have more ways to do it than any of us are taking advantage of.
If we’re lucky enough to be some of the ones who give.
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