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Star Wars meets Personal Development
When discussing the characters of Star Wars, a conversation about chance, randomness, and luck is unavoidable. With Han Solo alone, one of the franchise’s main characters, one could write an entire thesis on the uncanniness of his decision making and the inevitable outcomes that result.
One could write an entire thesis on Han’s ability to make choices that always end in his favor. Some have gone as far as to say that he may even have innate Force abilities that he is unaware of.
Whatever the source of Han’s of good fortune, chance, randomness, and luck have always played major roles in mythology. Star Wars is no exception.
From a story telling standpoint, chance, randomness, and luck can collectively be grouped into a plot device known as dues ex machina. Originating as far back as the plays of ancient Greece, these unexpected and unlikely occurrences make perfect sense and seem entirely natural because we know a “higher power” exists in the form of an author that creates randomness for the story.
But do these things actually exist in real life? What role do chance, randomness, and luck play in the events and outcomes we experience?
We discuss this depth in Path of the Jedi Episode #10 and the conclusion that we’ve come to is that luck doesn’t exist and believing otherwise can in fact corrupt your outlook in life. Listen to the full episode or read the transcript and you’ll see why.
You can find the full episode and transcript below.
Originally released October 20, 2021
(Intro soundbite) I mean, it’s no secret that Han likes to gamble. But if he was really so lucky, why is it that Han Solo owes people money pretty much all the time?
(Intro music and main podcast)
All right welcome to Path of the Jedi, the podcast where Star Wars meets personal development! My name is Ronnie Cruz your, host on this incredible journey. This week we’re going to be talking about LUCK in the Star Wars Universe and what it can mean for each and everyone of us. Before we get into all of that, let us kick it off like we always do it each episode with news and updates!
The first piece of news I’d like to share with you guys is that we are officially celebrating 500 downloads! That’s right, 500 downloads here at Path of the Jedi. Quite the Milestone and actually we hit it last week and I just wasn’t able to catch the [last] episode in time. I had already recorded and uploaded last week’s episode by the time I found out that we had 500. So we’re going to officially celebrate that milestone this week! And in fact, as of this recording we’re actually much closer to hitting 600 downloads. We’re only a handful of downloads away, with episode number one having over a hundred downloads on its own.
Guys, I just want to express my gratitude for your continual support for listening to the podcast. The numbers and the downloads, those milestones really are validation for me that we’re headed in the right direction at the very least, and that you guys are finding value out of the content that we’re sharing each week. So please continue to listen, please continue to share. And for those of you guys who are on Apple, don’t forget to rate and review.
The next piece of news is a big one folks. I’m super excited for this. After 3 intensive weeks of sitting in front of my laptop, including some very, very late nights, PathoftheJedi.com is now officially live! That is right our Path of the Jedi blog and website is now live so you can go visit it PathoftheJedi.com
Now it’s not fully fully populated yet. I’m slowly populating it with posts and other things. But it is active, it is live. One of my favorite features of the blog is that if you scroll down to the bottom of any page on the entire website, you’ll find the latest episode of the podcast and you can listen to it from anywhere on the website! So that is an awesome feature. It gives us another option as far as where you can go to consume or listen to Path of the Jedi Podcast. For those of you guys who like and prefer to listen to the podcast on a desktop situation as opposed to mobile this is great news for you.
Some other features that you can expect from the website: each podcast episode of actually have its own dedicated post that will include all the short blurb about the episode as well as the episode itself for you to listen to. And then – and this is what I really like – a full transcript of the episode. So now we’re broadening our accessibility to our deaf and hard-of-hearing community. If you know anybody that that falls into that category, now you have the opportunity to share Path of the Jedi with them through our website, PathoftheJedi.com
And of course there’s going to be other features. I’m going to continue to build out the website and the functionalities and the things that we’re going to be sharing with you guys. I’m going to be continuing to post outside of just the podcast episodes, you know, sharing my thoughts, my perspectives with you guys, the insights that I’m kind of learning along the way.
There’s a recommended reading list where it’s a collection of post that you can you can simply click on if you’re looking for for a new book to read right now. A lot of these books that we talked about here on the show as well as other books that I really enjoyed and have made an impact in my life. So many other things that are coming down the pipeline so feel free to check it out now and go explore the site. Come back and visited regularly because we are going to be posting and releasing lots of new things in the coming weeks and you are not going to want to miss it.
Again the website is live PathoftheJedi.com, go visited it today.
And now it’s time for the shout out! This week I’d like to give a shout out to my sisters Rowena Cruz and Roda Vargas. That’s right Rowena Cruz and Roda Vargas. I want to give a shout out to these two… well you might be saying, “Ronnie, pretty much all the people you’re giving shoutouts to are your family!” And yes of course! Why wouldn’t I?! I want to celebrate everybody and – I’m actually in the talk about that little later in the episode – but I wanted to give a shout out and celebrate these two because they have absolutely been crushing with our network marketing business.
As I mentioned in the past, our company is Yoli and we’ve recently gone through a massive, massive re-brand. We’ve launched a whole brand new category of products that as far as I know, we are the first to [launch these category] in the network marketing space. They’ve really, my sisters are really taking this bull by the horns and are taking charge and sharing the stuff with the world! They’re having such great success and most importantly they’re helping so many people along the way.
So if you want to link up with them, learn about what they’re doing and how their building, I will put their social medias, their Instagrams in the show notes of this episode. Again I really just want to take the time to celebrate them, congratulate them, give them a shout out for everything that they’ve done and continue to do.
Yeah, it’s pretty awesome. I love, I love this business and it’s even better when you get to do it with family and people that you care about. So congratulations again to my sister’s Rowena Cruz and Roda Vargas!
And of course if you have anybody that you’d like to give a shout out to, please message me. Send me an email to info@pathoftheJedi.com with the subject heading “Shout out”. In the body of the email let me know who you’re giving a shout-out to and your message. Or you can even send me an MP3 and I can play it here on the next episode. Again I really want to help you celebrate and recognize somebody who you care about that deserves the recognition, deserves the limelight. Again email us at info@pathoftheJedi.com with the subject heading “Shout out”
(movie soundbite of Obi-Wan) “In my experience there’s no such thing as luck.”
LUCK. That is our topic for this episode and I got to be honest, when I picked this quote for this episode I thought it was going to be pretty straight forward, pretty cut and dry. But it turns out there is a lot more to unpack than I had originally expected. So I want to take this from two different angles. Number one, the first angle is believing in luck. And the second angle that I want to talk about is using luck as an excuse.
Now the quote we just heard comes from Star Wars: Episode 4 – A New Hope. And it’s that scene on the Millennium Falcon where Obi-Wan is showing Luke for the first time how to use a lightsaber. If you want to reference it, it’s pretty much smack dab in the exact middle of the movie. This scene is really fun for this topic because with Obi-Wan and Han Solo… you pretty much have the embodiment of the exact polar opposites when it comes to the conversation about luck.
Obi-Wan clearly does not believe in luck. Han Solo he pretty much lives his life like luck is the only thing that he can rely on. So which is it? Does luck exist or does luck not exist?
Well, let’s first Iron which aspect of luck we want to talk about, because the connotations can change depending on context. For our conversation today I want to talk about luck in the context of CHANCE and RANDOMNESS and whether or not chance and randomness exist.
Now I’ve been sitting here for about an hour-and-a-half mulling this topic over and over in my head and I think I’ve finally come up with an answer. And the answer is this: luck in the form of chance and randomness does not exist. However, there are some occasions when we can be fooled into thinking that it does. What are those occasions?
To explain this, I first have to set the framework of this conversation on the concept of linear time – namely past events and future potential outcomes. Looking back or looking forward.
Now if you’re on this framework of linear time looking forward towards the future, that’s how I can see one could potentially think or be fooled into thinking that luck and chance and randomness exist because you’re pretty much looking and staring at an infinite set of future potentialities. It’s like a meteorologist giving a weather forecast, or a gambler at the craps table making a bet. They don’t truly have any idea what’s going to happen because anything can happen.
Even if you use data from the past and statistics, you’re still never going to be right 100% of the time. Well, isn’t that then an argument supporting the existence of luck and chance and randomness? No because it isn’t actually the future outcomes that are random. It’s actually in trying to predict what those future outcomes will be that the illusion of randomness and chance and luck appear. Because there are infinite future potentialities, it’s impossible to predict which one will actually come true and which one will actually happen. And because of that, this makes things feel very very random.
But when I look back – when I look back at the past circumstances, all the past events in my life – it’s pretty difficult for me to feel that any of it was random because number one, it already happened and number two, if it DIDN’T then we’d be in a totally different place right now. Everything in the past had to happen the way it happened. Not random at all. It had to happen exactly the way it happened in the sequence that happen in order for us to end up where we are today. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.
So I’m with Obi-Wan on this one when he says “There’s no such thing as luck”. There’s no such thing as luck. There’s no such thing as chance and randomness. Things happen the way they’re supposed to happen.
I’d like to think that Obi-Wan picked this lesson up from his old teacher Qui-Gon Jinn when Qui-Gon would always talk about being mindful of the living Force. Understanding that things in the past happened the way they were supposed to happen in hindsight can allow with profound understanding in the present moment in that if we are mindful of the here and now, things don’t have to happen TO us. Rather, they can happen FOR us, in the sense that they can give us a deeper understanding so that we can make better decisions in the present moment so that we can in turn be more purposeful and intentional about creating future outcomes.
Now understand there’s a big difference between creating your future outcome and trying to predict it. When you try to predict a future outcome, then you’re going to run into the illusion of randomness and chance. When you’re purposely and intentionally creating, when you set your sights on a vision and your goal, setting the intention of right now will trigger a sequence of events that will ultimately and inevitably lead to that future outcome therefore leaving zero room for chance, for randomness, luck.
Well what about Han in this conversation? The way people sometimes talk about him makes it seem like luck is his superpower. But is it really though? I mean, it’s no secret that Han likes to gamble. But if he was really so lucky, why is it that Han Solo owes people money pretty much all the time?
It’s not so much that Han is lucky. I think it’s more that he has a much lower version to risk than most people and because of that he takes more chances. Of course naturally, when you take more chances, you statistically get more results. And I’m okay with that. Part of the process of achieving your desired outcome is being willing to take chances, is being willing to take intelligent risks. You have to be willing to get out of your comfort zone in order for you to achieve and do things you’ve never done before.
So when Han says things like, “Never tell me the odds,” he might think and believe that he’s lucky. But what that translates to is that he just has a really high tolerance for risk.
Okay now that we’ve established that there’s no such thing as luck, where does using luck as an excuse come into the conversation? To illustrate this, one of the best examples that I can think of is the movie industry. So since we’re talking about Star Wars, let’s talk about Star Wars and in particular the latest of the Trilogies – Episodes 7, 8, and 9.
This Trilogy introduced us to a handful of relatively new, young, fresh faces, actors that weren’t necessarily recognizable prior to these movies. And because of this, we might be prone to say “Man they are lucky to land such a role on Star Wars, to have Star Wars be their big break.” Understand that behind every big break is countless hours, even years of hard work, of failure, of rejection. Big breaks don’t just happen in a vacuum. There is a massive sequence of events all backed by a tremendous, tremendous amount of effort that ultimately is what leads to a big break.
And the same thing can be said about any success. My network marketing career was a six-year overnight success. So dismissing somebody’s success as mere luck is completely unfair to them because you have no idea what went on behind the scenes. You have no idea what they went through to get to where they are. And it’s unfair to YOU because you’re basically telling yourself that success is impossible, that you can only achieve your dreams, your goals, your vision if you get lucky.
This is what I was talking about earlier during the shout-out portion of the show. Celebrate EVERYBODY. Celebrate every success big and small because behind all of it is an unseen sequence of events that is often times fraught with trials and tribulations, challenges, hardships that every individual faces that goes unseen. And when you do this you not only elevate and shine the light on them. You elevate and shine the light on yourself. In celebrating their success, in celebrating what’s possible for them, you’re celebrating in essence celebrating what’s possible for you.
And that’s going to do it for today’s episode. Wow! What do you guys think? Is luck a real thing? Does it exist or is it just an illusion? Let me know. I want to hear what you guys think. Send us an email to info@pathofthejedi.com with the title of this episode in subject heading. Leave us a message or send us an MP3, or course you can reach us on Facebook or Twitter @potjpodcast
And of course remember to visit our new website. Check it out PathoftheJedi.com and yeah well let us know what you think about that.
Oh and check this out! This just happened! As a we were recording this episode we officially are now over 600 downloads! So we celebrated 500 earlier, we celebrate by the end of this episode 600. So thank you very much everyone for tuning in and for continuing to make this podcast, this show a success. We will catch you next week! Until then, be well, be safe and as always, may the Force be with you!
