Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth — remember that you are a Black Swan.

We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By most astounding stroke of luck and infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist.

For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulations. Well done. You really are special.

It always comes back to us - why are we here? Well, we just happened to be here, we couldn't choose it. The chance of us being born - that sperm hitting that egg - is 400 trillion to 1. We're not special, we're just lucky; and this is a holiday. We didn't exist for 14 and a half billion years. Then we get 80 or 90 years if we're lucky, and then we'll never exist again. So we should make the most of it.

Luck is a capricious bitch. It won’t always go your way, so you can’t get trapped in this idea that just because you’ve imagined a possibility for yourself that you somehow deserve it.

In the depths of his tiredness, surrounded by these blank, sheep-like visages, he found himself pondering the accidents that had brought all of them into being. Every birth was, viewed properly, mere chance. With a hundred million sperm swimming blindly through the darkness, the odds against a person becoming themselves were staggering.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

Separate yourself from the complaining crowd. You can create your own luck. 'Luck is when opportunity meets preparedness'... well, I agree.

Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?

The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ...but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else.

Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability.

A piece of space-dust falls on your head once every day… With every breath, we inhale a bit of the story of our universe, our planet’s past and future, the smells and stories of the world around us, even the seeds of life.

Everything in life is luck.