Ruining a Romantic Miracle

A dear friend was telling the origin story of her happy marriage to the group.  She exclaimed that, “It was a miracle!”  “How else can you explain that I would just happen to be on a flight seated next to the man that was meant to be my husband?”  

Now let me be clear about a couple of things.  Firstly, I am as big of a romantic as the next guy, more so perhaps.  Secondly, this was a casual night out, over cocktails, with some close friends, not a wedding reception...so I went ahead and burst her bubble.  “It’s just math,” I explained.  

Let’s say you are walking down the sidewalk and see a building with a line of people stretched around the block.  The line snakes its way into a small building and out a separate door.  It looks to take about 10-20 seconds for a person to make it from the entrance to the exit.  The line is moving pretty quickly, so you get in to see what the fuss is about.  When you enter the building, you see a man at a table.  He flips a coin.  It comes up heads.  He flips it again.  Heads again.  Before the natural pace of the line moves you back out onto the sidewalk, you witnessed the man flip the coin ten times and it landed on heads every time!  Clearly, this is some sort of wizardry!  Or is it?

The odds of flipping an “honest” coin to land on heads ten times in a row on your first attempt is 1 in 1024.  Let me first state that most people would assume this to be a far more unlikely outcome than that.  In this example, however, there are other very important details that I left out.  We don’t know how many other people saw ten heads come up.  We don’t know if anyone else in that line witnessed a similar outcome.  Another thing we don’t know is how long this man has been sitting there flipping that coin.  Mathematically, if he was doing it for six hours or more, it is likely that at least a couple of people witnessed ten heads in a row.  (for more on this math, you can look HERE).  Given enough time, that eventual outcome is not an anomaly at all, but rather it is inevitable.

Let’s get back to my friend on the plane.  We will start with the large numbers.  In 2017, at any given moment one could confirm that there was an average of 9,728 passenger planes in the air carrying 1,270,406 people.  Considering the number of potential mates in the air, it seems inevitable that a few of them would strike up a conversation and hit it off!  In this case, there were even several factors that increased the odds.  For starters, they were in the tiny minority of the human population that can afford air travel.  Furthermore, it turns out that they were passengers on a weekday flight between New York City and San Francisco.  Any experienced traveler will tell you that there are certain flights that lend themselves to business travel, and this was one of them.  This increases the odds that your neighbor will be working age, in a certain income bracket, and traveling alone.  As if this wasn’t a good enough set-up for a mid-air love connection, they were seated in business class!  This narrows down the demographics of the travelers even further and adds some free alcohol to keep the conversation going!  By the time I had completed my analysis, my poor friend’s “how we met” miracle seemed almost inevitable.  At one point, I found myself wondering why dating services weren’t just booking singles on flights every day!

Here’s the thing:  I concede that it wasn’t exactly a “sure thing” that my friend would be seated next to “Mr. Right” on that plane.  As we determined, however, there were several factors at play that made the outcome more likely, and therein lies the lesson.

In financial planning, and in life, we can never truly control the outcomes.  Randomness and even luck are always factors.  What we can do, and what we should do every day, is to increase the probability of the outcomes we desire coming to fruition.  Just like with that couple in business class, we can take advantage of factors like position and timing to be in the best place for opportunity to present itself.  We must be willing to take advantage of such opportunities and take precautions to avoid potential mishaps.  Let’s not forget that if you are not seated next to the right neighbor today, there is always another flight waiting to take off.  If you combine strategies to improve your odds and have a very large number of opportunities, suddenly reaching your goals will not require any miracles.  In fact, your success might almost seem inevitable.

[If you enjoyed this article and would like to read more on the topic of increasing the odds of success, I also recommend reading “How American Idol Undermines Our Future” from 2018.]