[Book] Chances and Successes -- The Drunkard's Walk Wrap-up

Although regularity can be found in social data, the future of a particular individual is impossible to predict due to

• There are infinitely many possibilities,
• Minor change can lead to a significant change in outcomes (i.e., the Butterfly Effect), and 
• People are irrational. They sometimes act against their best interest. 

For a particular action, we all owe more to the chance (i.e., luck) than what most people realize.

“Chance is more fundamental than causality.”

Future is unpredictable. Things are uncontrollable. No matter how good you are, your attempts might just turn out in vain consecutively. The good news is one thing that we are in control, our effort, can even out the bad luck. As Bernoulli would say increasing attempts would bring our success rate to our true capability.

“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

It is important to plan, if we do so with our eyes opened. But more importantly, we ought to identify and appreciate the good luck we have, and recognize the random events that contribute to our success. Accept chance events that may cause us grief. Most of all, appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of the events that might have brought us down, and the absence of disease, war, famine, and accident that have not or have not yet befallen upon us. THEY ARE JUST CHANCES.

Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, Chapter 10 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Previous Part].

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now  for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like     the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.