The-Slight-Edge

66 The Slight Edge
successful before they bought that winning ticket? Have you ever wondered
why? It’s because successful people never win the lottery. Why not? Because they
don’t buy lottery tickets.
Successful people have already grasped the truth that lottery players have
not: life is not a lottery. Success is not a random accident.
Greek Gods and Real Heroes
In ancient Greek theater, characters generally got themselves into as much of a
mess as the playwright could possibly dream up. Everything would be headed for
an absolutely impossible disaster when (in the last few minutes of the play) an actor
playing a “god” would come floating down from the sky to make everything right—
banishing this character and reinstating that one, punishing another and granting
divine clemency to still another, explaining the inexplicable and solving the insoluble.
Things would be in such a mess, there’d be no way a human being could sort
the stuff out. Obviously, it would have to take a being with divine powers. And just
like in a stage production of Peter Pan, the actor would be suspended by ropes and a
system of pulleys, a mechanical contrivance they termed a “machine,” or machina.
Today, thousands of years later, people still refer to a last-minute “cheat”
solution for an impossible problem coming out of thin air as a deus ex machina, or
“god dropping in out of nowhere by a machine”—the supernatural, breakthrough
force that pops in just to make all things right. And by the way, when critics say a
play, novel or film uses a “deus ex machina,” it’s not a compliment! It’s their way
of saying, “Oh yeah, right. Couldn’t come up with a real solution, huh, so you
had to trot in a deus ex machina? Gimme a break!”
And that is just what it is people are hoping for: a break. The big break. The
lucky break. The breakthrough. A break in the routine ... a break with reality. A
deus ex machina. But that’s not how things really work.
Okay, then, how do things really work?
Look at some of the real-world problems that would have made Athena or
Apollo or any other deity of Greek drama pull their hair out.
William Wilberforce spent his entire career introducing bill after bill to his
colleagues in the British Parliament in his efforts to end slavery, only to have
them defeated one after the other. From 1788 to 1806, he introduced a new antislavery
motion and watched it fail every single year for eighteen years in a row.
Finally, three days before Wilberforce’s death in 1833, Parliament passed a bill
to abolish slavery not only in England but also throughout its colonies. Three
decades later, a similar bill would pass in the United States (spearheaded by