In the early hours of the morning on 11 February 2024, the 50-year-old billionaire and shipping tycoon Angela Chao died in the most unexpected of ways.
Chao graduated magna cum laude in economics from Harvard in 1994 and completed her MBA at Harvard Business School a few years later. After working in banking, she joined the Foremost Group, a global shipping behemoth started by her father, James, in the 1960s. She took over from her father as Chair and CEO of the Foremost Group in 2018. From a politically connected family, her sister Elaine worked in the Bush and Trump administrations and is married to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Adding to this stellar resume, Angela was married to billionaire American venture capitalist Jim Breyer. After the Covid-19 pandemic, they had their first child and moved from Manhattan to Texas, where they owned a 900-acre ranch (bigger than Central Park in New York).
On the evening of 10 February, Chao had a fun dinner and celebrated Chinese New Year with friends at the guest lodge on the ranch. When festivities wrapped up just before midnight, Chao decided to hop into her Tesla and take the short drive back to the main house. Leaving the lodge’s parking area, she made a mistake and reversed her car into a deep pond next to the house. Trapped inside the sinking vehicle, she drowned.
Before her death, Chao had more going for her than almost anyone on the planet - mother, wife, CEO, Harvard graduate, ultra-rich and connected. If you asked her on 9 February to list literally a million things that were on her mind and worrying her, driving her Tesla into a pond wouldn’t have made the list.
Usually, life doesn’t go as planned. This notion was reinforced this very week by events closer to home.
At the beginning of March, a young fighting professional opened a mixed martial arts gym near my home. Let’s call him Steve. Steve created the curriculum he would teach, kitted out the gym, designed a logo, and began to execute a marketing and sales strategy. But two weeks after opening, Steve tore his knee ligaments in an accident. Trying to teach jiu-jitsu with a busted leg is a tricky undertaking. Nonetheless, Steve improvised and continued to teach classes. Then, on Monday this week, another setback. Steve arrived to open the gym at 5 AM only to find the place underwater. The geyser of the newly installed shower had burst on Sunday, ruining the brand-new and expensive mats he’d fitted throughout the gym.
Similar to Chao’s Tesla accident, a busted knee and a burst geyser were nowhere in Steve’s plan.
In the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, author Oliver Burkeman gives this thought-provoking take on planning for the future:
We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.
Looking back at the last ten years, how many of the biggest events in your life were utterly random and unforeseeable - Covid 19, the death of a loved one, a chance encounter? I started dating my would-be wife after bumping into her at a social event that we both almost missed. I moved from South Africa to Dubai after a serendipitous coffee meeting. I then relocated to Amsterdam after the company I worked for decided to list on the stock exchange there. All three of these events were unexpected and totally out of my control, yet they had a massive impact on my life.
The moral of the story:
We worry a lot about the future.
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BUT, the future is largely out of our control.
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AND, we shouldn’t worry about things we can’t control.
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THEREFORE, worry less about the future.
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