Watch out, deep thoughts from a shallow thinker!

Woke up in the morning with the phrase, "The universe in a deck of cards."

I recently learned of the probability that no one--everyone--has ever ended up with the same deck of cards. Shuffling fifty-two cards ends up with as many possibilities as there are atoms in the galaxy. (So it should be "The Galaxy in a deck of cards," but I like the sound of the prior wording.)

Either way, from a human standpoint, the possibilities are virtually endless. Just a fifty-two card deck of that you and me and everyone in the world can hold in their hands. Think of all the inconceivably large number systems of the world that include more than 52 different forms. It's mind boggling. 

So what gives us little, bitty humans the idea that we can predict anything with any possibility?  We can't even solve "Three Body Problem." 

Basically, I suppose I'm talking about chaos theory. 

Yesterday, I looked up from my counter at the store and kind of blurted out to a random customer I was serving, "I can't believe this. Look at all these people milling about! I spent probably twenty years waiting for individual customers to come in and now this!"

I think they just looked at me blankly, but from my standpoint it seems like none of this was ever predictable. It simply can't be, because of all the factors. 

Sometimes I feel like there is something close to ESP among customers--that they all come in at the same moment or disappear at the same moment. But when there are endless possibilities, then endless variations that can and do happen. 

So what I think happens is that humans play the odds, that we rely on Occam's Razor to get through life.

Except when we don't. What really got me started on this line of thought is that I came up with a bit of a conspiracy theory that is both possible and improbable. Linda and I are selling the van we bought to travel with our cat. So the local dealer referred us to a dealer in the valley and we're going to drive over and see about leaving it there.

But of course, having driven three hours, the chances that we won't accept the terms of the deal offered are much less. So what if...what if the dealers are exchanging customers, making sure they clinch the deals?

It makes a certain amount of sense except--people are way too unpredictable to pull that off every time and if it doesn't happen every time, the advantage to the dealer disappears. Occam's Razor.

But it made me realize that once you start thinking in conspiratorial terms, there is no end to it, because there are no end to the possibilities. The possibilities are going to be mostly negative, but you can't prove a negative. That's where conspiracies gain their strength-- you can't really prove that something isn't... or couldn't happen. That way lies madness.

So we all muddle through life, attributing results to our own actions or to luck or to other people or to conspiracies. When all we can really do is try to reason out the odds and hope for the best.  

There's a thing I throw out sometimes when talking about business. It's about an article I read that talked about if you took three hundred companies that are all equal at the start, and they have to eliminate each other in competition for the customer, that one of those companies would end up on top.

So the natural tendency is to believe that the company that ended up on top was the best. That they possessed some secret competitive advantage that we can all learn from. 

But I repeat, you get the same results when all the companies are completely equal. All you need is to introduce the chaos of actual day to day business.

So we'll look back at Steve Jobs and think, "Of course he ended up at the top. He was a genius!" But what if there were hundreds, thousands, of people with comparable talents that just never had the chance? It's always easy to go back and look for the factors that played a part, but that's all in hindsight. 

I'm not saying that positive attributes don't play a part, just as I wouldn't say an Ace in the deck is equal to a Deuce. But that's also assuming that we're the one's shuffling the deck. I suspect that randomness and chaos play a much larger role than we like to think. 

For my own part, I feel thankful and grateful for how my life has turned out, because I feel in my gut that there are so many ways things could have ended up differently.  

I hope this has been helpful.