WEBVTT

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Hi, would your house catch fire next year? Nobody

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knows. It might, but it probably will not. Okay,

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how about this? Out of one million similar houses,

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about how many will experience a fire next year?

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Now, surprisingly, that is much easier to answer.

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Probability often works this way. The individual

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is difficult to predict, but the larger picture

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reveals patterns. This simple idea is one of

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the foundations of insurance. Insurance companies

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cannot predict which particular family will file

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a claim. But across millions of people, remarkably

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stable patterns emerge. And as an actuary, people

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sometimes think my job is predicting the future.

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And of course it is not. My job is finding patterns

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within uncertainty. And those patterns usually

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appear only after stepping back. Now I've tried

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to apply that same type of thinking to my own

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life. When I was taking actuarial exams, I set

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a goal of passing about two -thirds of the exams.

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So that meant I expected to fail some along the

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way. I just did not know which exams. True, every

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failing was disappointing, but it did not mean

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that I was failing. What it meant was I was still

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on the path that I had planned for. Probability

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reminds us that perspective matters. A single

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event rarely tells the entire story. Sometimes

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we need to step back before we see the larger

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pattern. So here's a question for you. Is there

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a disappointment in your life that might look

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different if you looked at it from a wider perspective?

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And have you given yourself enough margin to

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fail without feeling like a failure?