What game are you playing

Recently, while speaking to the founder of my company

He said something that stuck with me

"You have to build your own luck"

It stayed with me

Not as an abstract idea

But as a means of understanding my story so far.

Growing up,

My Amma — great-grandmother — used to tell a story from our Vedas

Of a king

Who was once told by a seer that he would lose his next war

The seer foretold his future by reading the king's palm

So the king,

In all his absurdness

Took a blade

And carved a new line into his hand

He then went to win that battle

Funny enough,

My amma always ended the story there

Following it by slicing fruit for me as I sat on the floor

Still thinking about the king

I remember watching her hands

As if she wasn’t just feeding me

But cutting open new possibilities into my future

So maybe that’s where it started for me

Maybe that’s why I decide to build my own luck

Or maybe it’s just a story I tell myself

To make sense of how I got here

To feel close to her

Maybe all origin stories are like that

Still, I knew early on

What game I was playing

It was about making

It was about speaking into the world

Engineering serendipity

Some days, it’s easy to follow the strange pulls

Other, there's a lot more of the static

Still, like a fault injector not afraid to break things

I find the unknown unknowns

By putting one "little noni" into the world at a time

Sometimes things break

Sometimes they don't (So I think)

And that’s how I build my own luck.

Try to.