The Music Of Chance

The dance partner of success

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve watched the US version of The Office.

I notice something different every time.

It works because everyone is funny.

Sure, Michael is the obvious lead, but Kevin, Stanley and Kelly deliver some of the biggest laughs in the entire show.

The studio had no idea how lucky they were.

So many things had to align perfectly for that series to become what it became.

The chemistry of Jim and Pam.

The perfect ensemble cast.

The decision to pivot away from the colder cynicism of the UK version after season one when they realised Michael Scott simply couldn’t work the same way David Brent did.

Steve Carell was too damn likeable.

But they almost never got the chance to make that adjustment.

Season one performed badly enough that cancellation looked inevitable.

Then something ridiculous happened.

A first-time director released a low-budget comedy starring Carell that made over $100 million at the US box office.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Overnight, the struggling sitcom suddenly had a newly minted movie star at its centre.

I should be so lucky

For years I used to tell newcomers to skip season one and jump straight to the good stuff.

But then you miss the real story.

Just like we often do in life.

We love pretending success was inevitable in retrospect. That the winners simply understood something the rest of us didn’t.

But the US version of The Office wasn’t some perfectly executed masterplan slowly unfolding exactly as intended.

It was a near miss.

A strange collision of talent, timing, adaptation and dumb luck.

I think most success stories probably look like that up close.

That doesn’t make the achievement less impressive.

If anything, it makes it more human.

You can be brilliantly talented and still need the universe to bounce your way a few times.

Agents of chaos

The universe can also be cruelly indifferent.

As Jean-Luc Picard once said:

“It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life.”

We hate that idea.

It threatens the comforting belief that outcomes are always proportional to merit.

But history is full of brilliant people who simply arrived too early, met the wrong market or lost to someone better positioned to capitalise on the same idea.

A man called Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse in 1964.

Most people have never heard of him. I hadn’t.

The wider world only really embraced the idea after Apple refined and commercialised it nearly twenty years later.

Now Engelbart is mostly a piece of tech trivia.

And Apple is Apple.

Same invention.

Wildly different outcomes.

Two thousand dice. Still no six

I’ve been lucky in my career.

I caught React at precisely the right moment. My experience level peaked just as tech contracting became unusually lucrative. Going freelance feeling absolutely confident work would keep coming was a privilege.

One that the next generation of developers may never experience in quite the same way.

But I’ve also watched projects evaporate overnight.

Seen funding disappear.

Watched people protect themselves by throwing others under the bus in client meetings.

Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose anyway.

That’s the uncomfortable part.

You can roll the dice two thousand times and still never land a six.

And yet, I still hear music in chance.