The Luck You Don’t See (Yet)

You never know when you are having a good day.

Today I’m wearing green and thinking about luck.

Many great things in my life, the moments I often chalk up to “good luck”, were not actually driven by random chance.

They were driven by an online algorithm - its own kind of special, unique magic.

I often think how lucky I am to have found my husband. But the real luck in my life happened months before we met, on the day an OkCupid engineer made a tweak to their dating platform’s algorithm. Maybe it was a big change, maybe it was small. I’ll never know. But that one adjustment meant that, eventually, my future husband would see my profile pop up in his feed.

My dad always says, “you never know when you are having a good day.” That good day for me was the day when that dating site engineer pushed the code live that would make my profile come up for Collin. That developer’s action set my life on a course toward love, marriage, and four very real, IRL children. And while that pull request was being approved, almost a dozen years ago now, I was just going about my day, completely unaware. And it was one of the luckiest days of my whole life.

Right now, maybe even at this very moment, a team somewhere is tweaking their algorithm on a platform you might use now, or will use in the future.

And maybe, someday in the future - on a lonely Sunday night or a busy Tuesday morning - their tweak will surface something life-changing for you. Perhaps it will a podcast that makes you feel less alone, a company to hire you, a new Instagram request from someone who turns into a lifelong friend or partner. Who knows?

Because you never know when you are having a good day.

So on a day dedicated to finding little bits of luck everywhere, may we trust that magic is always waiting to surface - unexpectedly, beautifully - in the algorithm of our lives.

-Molly Beck