Video: Paulo Coelho on Luck, Coincidence, and Faith

A very unlikely event happened to me this morning which brought me to question coincidence. I'm not going to discuss it in detail, just that it is one of those time when without any conscious reasons you do something different that usual and find out that the result of your usual behavior would have been disastrous. Now is that a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. I wish I knew the answer to that.

Curious, a quick Youtube search returned me an unsatisfying and boring video of a mathematical view on coincidence. I say, unsatisfying because the author basically said that applied to the masses coincidence just don't look as much a coincidence after all. It's true. There is 6 billion people on earth, anything can happen to anyone. With so many people doing so many things even the most bizarre things you can imagine probably happened to someone, somewhere, sometime. And I say boring, because every example from the 9 minutes video were just additional view of this concept, which I did grasp withing the first 20 seconds of the video.

So that was one point of view on coincidence. Paulo Coelho's view on coincidence is less scientific/mathematical but sounds a lot less cynical and a lot more empowering than the idea that things only happens because they do. A view to which you can at least gain something out of and build on. This discussion is part of a series of discussions linked in some ways to The Alchemist for the 20th anniversaries of the book release. So here's Paulo Coelho on this very subject:



What's your view on coincidence?