Chances. Changes. Choices.

In many ways a life or a career is the aggregation and summation of choices made, chances given and taken, and changes navigated.

Chances.

Chance drives much of life, beginning at birth.

Who we are born to, and the country we are born in, drives so many of the contours of our life and what we can become.

Being born to loving parents who are financially secure in a developed or rapidly developing country is a stroke of great luck which we often do not appreciate since the opportunities are greater and obstacles far fewer than someone born to struggling parents in an impoverished or war-torn nation.

Chances then adorn all of life in the chance meeting, the people who take chances on us and the chances given.

But as importantly the chances taken whether it be moving to a new place, betting on a new job, and taking risks.

And if we are fortunate life also is about chances we give.

The helping hand, the forgiveness provided, the small investment, the life changing advice and the risky hire.

Changes.

Change is life.

Everything changes and nothing stays the same.

Economies bloom and burst. New leaders come and go. Health fluctuates. Relationships thrive and wither. Technology enables and disrupts. Great misfortune and loss are interwoven with unexpected windfalls and victories.

Navigating change is often both facing its reality and learning that how we adapt and respond to change and changing times determines its impact on our lives and the future more than the change itself.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote, “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes is so”

Choices.

“The difficulty in life is the choice” George Moore.

The choices we make are often determined by chance and change but unlike chance and change tend to be more under our control.

Because chance and change constantly offer us the option or sometime force us to make choices.

And choosing is not easy particularly since the future is unknowable and only as time unfurls will it be clear which choice among many was the ideal.

While every choice impacts us the three biggest choices tend to be a) what we do for a living, b) who we decide to spend our lives with and c) where we decide to live.

Career. Home. Partner.

These are not necessarily one-time choices which since we can change careers, where we live and who are partners are, but these seem to be the most important ones and its probably the ones we should spend the most times mulling.

And we humans even if we make the right choices we wonder if we did.

The job not taken, the person not pursued, the place not moved to. We often think life might have been even better if we had made other choices often forgetting it might have been much worse.

A good exercise in self-reflection is to think about the biggest changes, chances and choices we have had to deal with or had to make and what we have learned from those.

Since as long as we live, we will have to deal with chances, changes and choices.