A story about luck
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Today’s stories in a nutshell:
🍀 A story about luck
🫀Human body systems
👩🎨 The creative process
😂 Comedic philosophy
🧩 Try a new game
🍀 Life: A story about luck
In 1971, a 22-year-old Serbian woman named Vesna Vulović took a step towards realising her dreams of travelling the world by becoming a flight attendant for JAT Airways, Yugoslavia’s national flag carrier. A few months into the job, JAT airways mistakenly assigned her to a flight from Copenhagen to Belgrade, confusing her for another Vesna that worked for the airline. Vulović couldn’t believe her luck as she had never been to Denmark before.
Flight JAT 367 departed Copenhagen on the afternoon of 26 January 1972. Almost an hour into the flight, at an altitude of 33 300 feet (10 km), a bomb exploded in the baggage compartment. The plane ripped into three pieces, and the debris and the 28 passengers and crew came hurtling down to earth, crashing down in a snow-covered forest in Czechoslovakia.
Amidst the wreckage, a woodsman heard the voice of a young woman screaming for help. Vulović had survived BOTH the mid-air explosion and the fall from 10km. Despite suffering severe injuries, she made a full recovery.
This story got me thinking about luck. Vulović was insanely lucky to have survived the ordeal. But being erroneously booked onto the flight and suffering a bomb blast on a plane was equally unlucky.
The world celebrates geniuses and visionaries, but how much of their successes are attributable to being at the right place at the right time? Would we have known about Bill Gates had he not been born into a well-to-do American family? What if his parents didn't send him to one of the few schools that had a teletype terminal to a computer that allowed him to learn how to program? What if he didn’t meet Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen at school? Would he have been able to surf the technological wave of the time had he been born ten years later?
Of course, outcomes in life are not solely based on luck, but it's probably the biggest contributor to all of one’s success in life.
🫀Health: Your body
I’ve never had Covid (officially). Two years into the pandemic, I was starting to believe that I had a superhuman immune system. But that changed this week when my antigen test showed a bright red line next to the “T”. Damnit!
Spending most of the week in bed, I’ve been wondering about what is going on inside my body. What precisely is causing that burning sensation in my chest, the fatigue, and the headaches? How is my body fighting back? I’ve felt like a bystander whilst a war has been raging inside of me.
To remedy my ignorance, I’m progressively learning about how my body works. As a starting point, I’m learning about the 11 organ systems in the human body, each critical to our survival.
Whenever I take time to learn more about the human body, I’m astonished by how sophisticated a piece of machinery it is. Your heart, for example, serves as a big pump pushing blood through your body to your organs. It beats around 100 000 times a day (for your entire life), dispensing 260 litres of blood per hour. It takes about 45 seconds for blood to circulate from the heart, around the body, and back to the heart again. Think of another machine that works with such force and precision for so long. Miraculous.
To learn more, check out 👉 Understanding the 11 Body Organ Systems
👩🎨 The arts: Ira Glass on the creative process
Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of This American Life, broadcast to more than 1.7 million listeners each week. His seemingly overnight success was many many years in the making. If you are an aspiring creative, you may find his words of advice meaningful (2 min video).
😂 Comedic philosophy: Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy
Good comics are masters at observing society. In many ways, they are like modern-day philosophers. Here’s Louis CK riffing about how we are alive during the most fantastic time ever, yet people remain unsatisfied (5 min video).
🧩 Weekend games
Test your vocabulary: Wordle
Test your geography: Globle
Test your knowledge of maps: WorLdle
NEW: Guess the country based on its exports: Tradle
In case you missed it, check out last week’s edition: Becoming a billionaire and anadiplosis
I really enjoyed the thread of gratitude throughout this edition; time well spent!