How Probability affects life

Dr. Surendra Kumar Shukla
3 min readJul 28, 2021

When I passed my SSC exam, my father wishes to see me as a Doctor. I had filled the form, written Biology as the subject choice. I went to my school and submitted the form to the in-charge (A teacher who collects the form). The teacher before accepting my form has scanned my SSC Result. I was got 94 marks out of 100 in Maths Subject and 82 out of 100 in Science Subject. The teacher surprisingly looked at me and puzzled why Science and why not Maths.

The teacher insisted I opt for Maths as the main Subject instead of Science Subject. I took 2 minutes and changed my decision from Biology to Maths. The instant when the teacher has intervened with me for my dad's decision was a point where I could be a move to either Direction, A biologist, or a Mathematician/Engineer.

In Life, we get important incidences where we need to make decisions and that decision takes our life further ahead. That decision is simply a probability that decides whether we outperform or will lose the game.

Take another scenario, You have started your bike and were moving towards your office. After few minutes you see a person has got injured and needed help. Here again, you need to decide, whether to help or not. Suppose you helped and you spend some of your time there let say 10 minutes. After providing the help, you again move to your office. You just moved to 10 minutes and see in a square there is a huge accident has taken place exact10 minutes before. I guess you will thank God as you were 10 minutes late. But you were late as you had helped that person.

Here you might conclude that helping others “affects you and you were safe to the accident”. But you are wrong. As after 10 minutes as you reach to your office, your boss has just put the order to remove you from the Job as you are late for your duty.

One of your decision has made you happy as you just skipped from an accident whereas another time you lost your job. You might still see the profit in your decision that, at least I will be saved and did not lose much.

In life your decisions are similar to Probability, it might or might not be advantageous to you. Now, you might think, what to do for the good probablity.

In life, we should have to accept each and every moment which is coming to us. And need to decide instantly considering our moral values to perform a duty or not. Your decisions might be helpful for you or may not be in favor of you. But if we work towards and the direction of Nature, you will get the benefits from the Nature.

Consider another situation, you are very punctual and reach each and every place on time, you should have to do this and follow. However, there is a number of other variables in terms of probability are running around you which will affect you in a way. It might be due to your punctual schedule you may get some unfavorable things, traffic jams, accidents, etc,. Conversely, making our life uncertain, and not reaching on time to some event/place may also not favor you. Now again same question, Whether to be punctual or not?

We try to understand this puzzle in terms of probability- When all probabilities sum matches against you then you will suffer whereas if the sum of the probability will be in your favor you will get the benefit. Suppose you are going for an interview wherein the panelist there is a very strict person who is supposed to come to take your interview. If he will come, your probability of being get selected is less. However, if he will not attend the interview, you might be selected. Therefore, that person's probability of coming to the interview will decide whether you will be in or not.

In summary, a person in their whole life moves from one probability state to another and reaches some sub-final stages. In some stages, he gets the benefits and in some stages, he gets the loss. We should have to perform our duty to match with the probability of Nature and God to succeed in life.

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Dr. Surendra Kumar Shukla

My name’s Surendra Kumar Shukla. I’m a writer, teacher, and Computer architect. Writing on Life-changing thoughts.