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Part 1: The Illusion of Control

Part 2: Navigating Uncertainty in a Complex World

Part 3: Embracing Flukes and the Beauty of Uncertainty

Highlights

To this day, the Japanese refer to “Kokura’s luck” whenever someone unknowingly escapes from disaster. (Location 84)

Note: Kokura era nella lista per il lancio dell’atomica ma fu salvata dalle nuvole. Per questo ancora oggi quando uno ha fortuna si dice “La fortuna di Kokura”.

We like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. We want a rational explanation to make sense of the chaos of life. The world isn’t supposed to be a place where hundreds of thousands of people live or die from decades-old nostalgia for one couple’s pleasant vacation, or because clouds flitted across the sky at just the right moment. (Location 87)

From a very young age, I, like you, learned that causes and effects follow straightforward patterns—from X to Y. It’s a useful, stripped-down version of reality with precisely one cause and one effect. (Location 90)

To explain how we came to be who we are, we recognize pivot points that so often were out of our control. But what we ignore are the invisible pivots, the moments that we will never realize were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. We can’t know what matters most because we can’t see how it might have been. (Location 102)

Note: Individuiamo i punti nodali della nostra vita ma ignoriamo quelli invisibili, che pure esistono.

the most astonishing revelation is that our paths are not determined solely by us. Instead, the garden we live in has grown and been tended by everything and everyone that came before us. (Location 118)

The real story of our lives is often written in the margins. Small details matter, and even the apparently insignificant choices of people we will never meet can seal our own fates—though (Location 322)