Over the last 3 days, 3 interesting things happened to me. On Sunday I met a colleague who used to work with TWB about 8yrs back who has come back to work with me. A talented programmer, he lost pretty much everything other than the shirt on his back and he is consumed by the question – why did it happen to him? Then on Monday I was giving a motivational talk at a company when I talk about my own life experiences and “How to be an Entrepreneur on a Salary”. Many people cringed because it is difficult for them to fathom what I went through, and most importantly why? Then yesterday I was with a person who is a spiritual guide to scores of people. He spent a great deal of time telling me that most of the great upsets of my life had a reason and that it shows me I should not focus on dogs, only focus on myself and look for a lower ambition and quality of life.

All these made me cringe in turn. And I ended up asking myself why am I upset about someone finding a reason in their misfortune, or in mine? Isn’t this what pretty much everyone does — looks for a reason for any tragedy that befalls and then make this ‘learning’ into new normal? People who lose a fortune learn to live at a smaller scale, people who have lost in love vow never to love again, people who have lost a dog will never keep a dog again — even though in the scheme of life these are not even real tragedies but mere blips.

The reason for your misfortune

It is an evolutionary trait that people look for patterns in their lives and that includes in their own behavior and that of others. A lot of our responses, fears, motivations come from there. When you’re walking on a lonely stretch hearing footsteps but not being able to see it makes you wary of danger. On the other hand footsteps in the kitchen mean your spouse or kid is back home. By extension, we are trained to look for cause and consequence. What could the cause be of this extraordinary misfortune that has come upon me — this heartache that doesn’t go, this failure at work, this loss of business, this debilitating illness? The reality is that I have suffered not one but all these setbacks and it is not that I have not asked myself these questions. I have lost the person I relied on and loved the most, I lost a successful company and went from being wealthy to bankrupt, I’ve suffered the public humiliation of an arrest covered in newspapers for days and I live with not with one but at least 4 life-threatening conditions. Surely there was a reason each of these things had happened? Surely I could have avoided each of these and maybe I should be wary of trust and looking for contentment over ambition, peace over passion.

The problem looking for reasons

Since all these misfortunes did not come at the same time I have had a lifetime to think through some of this. I realized that there was actually no cause and effect, no reason for any of these things had happened. Most of these are purely random events.  Life, for the most part, will not follow the script you wrote. Like someone said life is already happening to you when you are looking for it.

To begin with, we look for reasons for great misfortune in the wrong places — we reason it must be some greater purpose, or some omnipotent force of the universe or some preordained script of our lives. Loss of love and trust of the woman you loved must then mean that in the future you will not find that true love or all women are untrustworthy. The truth is entirely the opposite. The loss of love is a chance occurrence, there is no pattern and it does not point to anything for the future. Asking yourself the reason, therefore, is asking the wrong question.

The other danger in looking for reasons makes you keep revisiting the past to look and obsess with ‘why’ or ‘why me’. It makes you lazy in thinking if this would have not happened I could have been, say, as successful as someone else. It makes you accept reality as you see at the present. It saps energy and vitality from you. It was this what was making me upset – because I was being told there was a reason, there is a pattern and that pattern holds into the future. And I would not allow my future to be held hostage by anything.

I am not alone feeling that. I find that the people I admire most have 2 things in common (1) they have overcome tragedy and pain that would immobilize most people & (2) they rejected the notion of there being a reason for every loss and failure. They rejected it because it makes them avoid the responsibility of making hard choices, and they know that you have to take responsibility to create future success which must now be built on greater odds.