Position Yourself to Benefit From Luck

I commute by train to work each day. Every morning, commuters line up along the train platform in clumps, anticipating where the train will stop.

Most of the time, the train will stop so that the doors line up in front of the clumps of people. However, sometimes the train will over or under-shoot the clumps.

There is no way to predict this but, one thing I realized, is that if you line up behind a human clump, you will never have a chance to get on the train first.

So I always line up next to a clump, so that there is nobody in front of me. This way, I sometimes get lucky and the train stops right in front of me.

Today was such a day.

This is a very petty achievement but, I realized that there is a lesson here. We may not be able to predict when somethings happen, but we can position ourselves to take advantage of them if they occur.