I often consider myself a very lucky person in different ways, to the point that it feels as if fate sometimes looks down at me at opportune moments and says:”This one will be lucky!”

It’s hard to explain why, but the universe has given me opportunities to have things happen in greater numbers than I might expect given what I know, have, or have been able to get given my disposition and nature.

Some people don’t really believe in luck – they think that the universe and how it shows up is always a result of skill, preparedness, or some combination of the two; to these people, relying on fate is almost irresponsible.

I see this as the nature of my cello teacher, Timmy – someone who recommends that we practice until we ‘cannot get it wrong’ – where the natural consequence would be to get it right rather than to err in the moment; I see this as the characteristic professed by those who are both good and have the prospect of becoming better in an ever-continuing loop, whatever profession they may have.

But realistically, I think that’s at best an approximation to what reality is going to hand out as part of her card game – in a cello performance, you could break a string; a baseball could fly in from a broken window and destroy your cello even though baseball isn’t played in this country; you could do every single math problem right but then maybe the exam papers are torn apart by zombie sheep in the middle of the night hiding in the school compound – who knows???

None of that is to deny skill, to deny practice – but neither is this an attempt to say that we should scream to ourselves that luck isn’t real.

Was it by skill or by luck that I’ve managed to appear on former Ministers’ podcasts at this point, invite people to speak with me of strange yet legendary ilk, get the police to subscribe to me on YouTube, have multiple Ministers aid me in complaints directly, criticize multiple people with no apparent issues, push freedom of speech to what seems to be the absolute hilt in this place we call Malaysia, and to just go forward in life with no apparent cognitive dissonance or fear from the unknown unknowns of this world or reason to feel any of that?

I would imagine that part of it was by skill, but spiritually, it feels to me to be more like luck – like all of the things that have happened recently, I want to say didn’t happen because I deserved it even though maybe a little part of me (maybe a big part of me) deserved it by the intelligent choices that I made over the course of time – choices that I suppose make me a bit of an odd duck.

It is nice to think sometimes that you are not responsible – and the ambiguities of luck and chance in this complex universe sometimes allow us to paper over what had really happened in ways that we may believe but cannot prove.

I want to believe that all of it happened in a dream – that somehow I had coasted and it was the inevitable result of living, breathing, existing; but can a person really say that when a little part of them is moving forward as quickly as they can, ignoring most if not all external feedback?

Speed is everything in our world today.

Cliche as it sounds, I think the phrase captures at least a part of the truth – for in my mind, it is unquestionably true: how fast you do things, how fast you decide to do them – all of that features in the grand exposition of what defines success and failure in this modern world.

In a way, this makes a lot of sense – in the grand totality of all perishable and improbable endeavor, regardless of how strong you are, it is useless if you cannot hit a target; if you go first, you become a first mover and can dominate the competition. In a world where so many other factors can exist but are just a little less relevant, here then is the limiting reagent around which others tiptoe, their entire existence negotiable; and in a world where the fast define the agenda and where competition is the norm and not the exception, a fast world isn’t out of expectation and neither is it unfair – it is the logical consequence of our life in what we might call a late-stage capitalism society.

I’m not writing this to complain about it – in fact, if I were to be honest with myself, I rather enjoy it.

I enjoy living in a fast-paced world, a place where we get things done quickly and efficiently, where daily is the process of moving faster and getting better, more efficient, more skilled, even in a world where everyone is moving forward as quickly as possible – all of us time-bound – refining the small and daily things that I do without a clear limit or end to the sequence of improvements in body and mind.

If I reflect a layer deeper, I begin to wonder if I am the way that I am and we are as we are not just because of competition – but perhaps because I, or we, have the sense that time is running out even as every human being moves forward at the same rate with the same constraints under unique and differing challenges of life.

I don’t have an answer to all of that – and the only answer I suppose that the universe will give is the universe it displays to all of us as individuals as we look around us, move forward, reference the actions, behaviors, attitudes of the billions who live on this planet as well.

Perhaps my having written what I wrote reveals me as part of the problem for those who cannot stand the pace of this world – one of those who normalize this pace that we move at, cherishes how we find ourselves constantly in an onward push, considers the inner workings of the clockwork within him the wholly normalized character of the machinery whether it is true or not; after all, we are not isolated from culture or society.

Hello everyone, welcome back. In the last post, I talked a little bit about how influencing means changing people’s behavior, and I also talked about how I like it.

Yes, I very much do.

It gives me a sense of interest and investment that somehow because of what I said or what I think in some way, people change the way that they behave.

Some people have different terms for this. One of them is “power” – the ability to change things in some way, shape, or form.

But, of course, the words that we use shape the way that we interpret these ideas; calling someone a person who has secured power is different from calling them an influencer.

In the first case, notions of authoritarianism and control come to the fore.

In the latter, the idea of people just being persuaded and swayed like they would be if they were little children listening to the Pied Piper might be as they sway, swagger, and walk along as the flute plays to the musician’s intended destination.

I align a little more with the latter in the sense of making people move closer and closer towards something they had always wanted.

But the longer and longer I live, the more and more I come to realize that what I’m becoming able to do is to use power in certain ways that maybe not everyone can make use of.

It’s a little strange to see or to think about, but that’s just the reality that we’re facing at the moment.

Why things ended up this way and why I became able to wield institutional power in some ways is itself, I think, a funny story which I might want to talk about someday.

But well, it is what it is.

Either way, I know what I want to be in spirit… But things have made it so that in terms of consequence I’ve become able to do certain things that were not possible before.

Looking forward to seeing what’s next!