There’s an interview with Simon Peyton Jones*I’m a huge fan of his trademark presentation slides set in Comic Sans I highly recommend watching. It’s full of interesting observations on type theory, Haskell, functional programming, and the future of programming.

One quote at the end stood out to me in particular:

If you could go back to when you just graduated from college and give yourself some advice what would you say?

All of these people who you see, very successful, wandering around looking as if they’ve made it - I guess you might class me among them now - they, all of them, are just making it up as they go along. They feel insecure, uncertain, not sure what to do next, not sure of what their next steps are, not sure what next big problem they’re going to tackle, unsure about whether what they’re doing is going to be successful or not.

And so, all of their confidence… they project confidence - maybe that’s partly a life skill - but often they’re not. And so, the fact that, in those days, I felt very not confident, I would say - since all of these successful people are making it up as they go along, it’s fine for you to be as well, and they’ve been lucky. But if you want to be lucky, you do need to put yourself in a position where accidents can happen to you, and that means taking risks.

So if you want to be lucky, you need to put yourself in positions where lucky things could happen, right? And that means taking some kind of risk. So if you’re very conservative and never take any risk, then it’s very unlikely that the accident that is life-transforming will happen.

That’s a balance, of course. But it means accidents are not so bad. Of course, dying is bad, but lots of accidents may change your life in a way that might be surprising to you, but turns out to be not so bad in retrospect.