Luck is the variable everyone leaves out of the model

Every origin story I've read is a description of an outcome with the dice quietly removed. Mine included. So here is the honest version, dice first.

I was born in Vacoas-Phoenix, on an island most people cannot place on a map, to parents who could afford the school fees. That is the first roll and it is the largest one. Nothing I did earned it.

The second was a teacher who noticed I liked the computer lab more than the corridor, and who left it unlocked at lunch. I have no idea whether that was policy or kindness. I know what it did.

The third was an admissions officer at a university I had never seen, in a town I could not picture, deciding that a kid from Mauritius with no American test-prep industry behind him was worth a scholarship line.

None of that is humility, and I am not fishing. It is just the accurate model. The effort was real too — the nights in the lab were mine, the eleven attempts at dholl puri were mine — but effort is the term everyone already includes. The dice are the term everyone drops, because a story with dice in it is harder to sell as a lesson.

I write it down because I want to be able to look at it. The version of this page without this paragraph would be a nicer read and a worse description of what happened.