Hi, would your house catch fire next year? Nobody
knows. It might, but it probably will not. Okay,
how about this? Out of one million similar houses,
about how many will experience a fire next year?
Now, surprisingly, that is much easier to answer.
Probability often works this way. The individual
is difficult to predict, but the larger picture
reveals patterns. This simple idea is one of
the foundations of insurance. Insurance companies
cannot predict which particular family will file
a claim. But across millions of people, remarkably
stable patterns emerge. And as an actuary, people
sometimes think my job is predicting the future.
And of course it is not. My job is finding patterns
within uncertainty. And those patterns usually
appear only after stepping back. Now I've tried
to apply that same type of thinking to my own
life. When I was taking actuarial exams, I set
a goal of passing about two -thirds of the exams.
So that meant I expected to fail some along the
way. I just did not know which exams. True, every
failing was disappointing, but it did not mean
that I was failing. What it meant was I was still
on the path that I had planned for. Probability
reminds us that perspective matters. A single
event rarely tells the entire story. Sometimes
we need to step back before we see the larger
pattern. So here's a question for you. Is there
a disappointment in your life that might look
different if you looked at it from a wider perspective?
And have you given yourself enough margin to
fail without feeling like a failure?