What made THE difference in your life?
A friend of mine and I were talking today about how seemingly random events have made radical changes in our lives.
He related the story of how he was chosen for a program where high-achieving students from around the U.S. were selected to participate in an event with famous and influential motivational speakers. He said that although he was a good student, he was not very motivated and was planning to attend a community college and see where life would take him.
However, after the intensive three-day program that was populated with 500 high school students from the nation’s top schools—most of which were planning on attending Ivy-League universities—he questioned his tepid approach to personal achievement and realized that it was up to him to take charge of his future like those in the program around him. Subsequently, he started at that community college, but then transferred to Stanford, achieved his degree in engineering, and found his soulmate and future wife while at school. He now has been married for over 15 years, has two beautiful children, a fabulous home in Palo Alto, and is considered a “rock star” of software development in Silicon Valley.
What is particularly interesting is that the selection of students to participate in the program was shared between two schools, with each one taking turns selecting a boy and a girl each year. Not only did my friend benefit from the randomness of him being a boy, in a “boy” selection year, but he was selected because the student with the highest GPA could not write particularly well, and the selection committee could not bring themselves to elect a representative that had poor skills in that area, regardless of grades.
So what would have happened if it were a “girl” year? What if the boy with the highest GPA—obviously an otherwise excellent student—had listened to his parents and focused on writing as much as his math and science? Would those random and disconnected events have barred my friend from finding excellence within himself, or a Stanford education, or his wife, or his children, or his stellar career? How would his life have been different?
Call it serendipity, the butterfly effect, chaos theory or plain dumb luck—we all have tipping points that have made major differences in our lives. What random event or meeting made all the difference in your life? Leave a comment below.
Peter Radsliff
CEO, Presto Services Inc.