We should believe in luck.

God Translation Bureau is a compilation team under 36Kr, focusing on fields such as technology, business, the workplace, and life. It mainly introduces new technologies, new ideas, and new trends from abroad.

Editor's note: Even though the rewards of hard work are full of randomness, we still need to find meaning in the indifferent universe through our own actions. This article is from a compilation, and we hope it will inspire you.

[Image source: Pixabay]

Oil tycoon J. Paul Getty once said: There are three rules to getting rich - get up early, work hard, and drill for oil. This widely circulated maxim reveals a well - known truth: Luck and opportunity contribute no less to success than any other factor.

However, we don't admire others because of luck. Lottery winners or those who leave the roulette table with a fortune rarely receive praise. Instead, we admire talent, skill, and dedication. This creates a contradiction: although luck has a huge impact on the outcome, only by improving our abilities through hard work is something we can control.

This is exactly the essence of what French writer Albert Camus called "existential rebellion." Even though the rewards of hard work are full of randomness, we still need to find meaning in the indifferent universe through our own actions. Therefore, believing in luck itself is a form of rebellion. Working hard, constantly striving, and improving skills in this world is not naive, but a form of rebellion.

1. How Einstein Became an Icon

Although we now regard Einstein as an icon, in the early 20th century, Albert Einstein was unpopular for a long time and even faced a lot of criticism. As a German after World War I, in an era of high anti - Semitic sentiment, being Jewish and with an image of being self - important and aloof from the world, he claimed that only a few people in the world could understand his strange theories. On April 3, 1921, when Einstein first arrived in the United States, the situation suddenly reversed. When he arrived at New York Harbor, he found thousands of people shouting words of praise and waving handkerchiefs waiting for him. Einstein's unexpected popularity, combined with his kind and eccentric personality, made major newspapers put the news of his arrival in the United States on the front page.

This was actually a misunderstanding. The crowd was not there for Einstein, but to see Chaim Weizmann, a popular Zionist leader, and Einstein was traveling with him to raise funds for the Hebrew University. However, this misunderstanding helped Einstein establish his iconic status. In the golden age of physics, his brilliance even outshone stars like Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger.

After that, the Matthew effect began to take hold. As Einstein's fame grew, newspapers rushed to report on him and asked him to interpret the scientific breakthroughs of the time. Just as the rich get richer and the famous become more famous, Einstein not only became a scientist but also a cultural benchmark.

However, Einstein studied physics not for fame and fortune. In fact, it was his insistence on following the rules that led to difficulties, unemployment, and poverty in his early career. When he stepped into New York Harbor, although his groundbreaking work was already completed, he continued to study physics until his death in 1955.

2. A Prodigy Almost Forgotten by History

One morning in January 1913, famous mathematician G. H. Hardy opened his mail and found a letter with illegible handwriting. The letter began:

"I hereby recommend myself to you: I am currently a clerk in the accounting department of the Madras Port Trust, with an annual salary of £20. I am about 23 years old, have not received a university education, and have only completed ordinary school studies. I often study mathematics in my spare time."

The letter was attached with what seemed like mathematical gibberish, using a strange symbol system, and put forward "almost absurd" theoretical claims. Except for a small part, the rest was difficult to understand, and this passage directly refuted a conjecture that Hardy had put forward a few months ago. Thinking it was a well - designed prank, he threw the letter into the trash can.

However, the thought lingered in his mind all day, and Hardy finally retrieved the letter. That night, he took the letter to visit his long - term collaborator J. E. Littlewood. By midnight, they realized that they had met one of the greatest geniuses in the history of world mathematics: the poor Indian youth Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Ramanujan, who lived in extreme poverty and was mostly self - taught, accidentally read an advanced mathematics book as a teenager. After studying it eagerly, he began to fill his notebooks with theorems and proofs. He showed these results to local mathematicians, but no one could really understand their value. With the help of friends, Ramanujan sent letters to three famous professors at Cambridge. The first two ignored him, and the third was Hardy.

Ramanujan was by no means the first young mathematician to send papers to famous scholars. Most, like his first two letters, were lost in the long river of history. But he had the courage to try and finally got lucky, benefiting all of humanity. More than a century later, mathematicians are still widely studying his notes and gaining new knowledge from them.

Hardy was an undisputed genius and one of the most important mathematicians of the time. But when asked about his greatest discovery, he answered without hesitation: "Ramanujan."

3. A Miracle Therapy Almost Missed

In 1891, Dr. William Coley had an unusual idea. Inspired by a rare case (a patient with a severe infection miraculously cured cancer), he deliberately injected a high - dose of bacteria into a patient's neck tumor. A miracle happened: the tumor disappeared, and the patient did not have a recurrence five years later.

To replicate the success, he developed a special toxin mixture that could activate the immune system. Unfortunately, he was never able to reproduce the initial effect stably. The medical community was skeptical of his idea, and when radiotherapy emerged in the early 20th century, Coley's scientific research results were almost completely forgotten.

Dr. William Coley had a rough life.

But his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, refused to let this idea die. In 1953, she received a $2,000 grant from Nelson Rockefeller and founded the Cancer Research Institute, dedicated to exploring immunotherapy for cancer. Although the medical community generally scoffed at it, the institution still inspired a small group of followers to continue exploring, although most of the efforts were in vain.

In 1996, there was a turning point: researcher Jim Allison intuitively published a landmark paper, suggesting that Coley's theory might indeed have value. He used an innovative method and achieved amazing results in mouse experiments. "The tumor just melted away on its own," Jim later described to me.

Excited, he went to pharmaceutical companies, hoping to get financial support. However, he was rejected everywhere because pharmaceutical manufacturers had already invested billions of dollars in similar research and lost everything, and hundreds of experiments had failed. "It was frustrating," Jim recalled. "I knew this discovery could change the world, but no one was willing to invest."

However, he didn't give up. He collected more data, traveled around, and kept explaining the value of his research. After three years of hard work, he finally found a small biotech company, Medarex, that was willing to support him and his research. The resulting drug would open the door to cancer immunotherapy and make it a viable treatment. Jim finally won the Nobel Prize in 2018.

4. Become an Existential Rebel

Camus believed that human existence is absurd. He compared the human situation to Sisyphus in Greek mythology, the king who was cursed to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity, only to watch it roll back down. Amazingly, Camus' Sisyphus returned to the bottom of the hill to continue his work with joy, because he found meaning in the repetition.

This is the essence of existential rebellion: creating meaning for oneself in a meaningless universe. After 20 years of researching innovation, transformation, and change, I've found a constant truth: you can't control luck. Anything can happen. Things that seem "a sure bet" often fail, while low - probability events happen all the time.

We can easily imagine a world where Einstein spent his whole life as a patent clerk, only studying physics in his spare time; Ramanujan lived in poverty all his life, and his genius was never known to the world; and Dr. William Coley's vision of a revolutionary cancer therapy came to nothing. But they all persevered in the indifferent universe, and we all benefited from it.

We can't control luck, but we can choose how to pursue meaning. In his later years, Einstein was committed to a theory that he never completed in Princeton, New Jersey. On his deathbed, Ramanujan defined a new category of mathematical functions. Dr. Coley, known as the "father of cancer immunotherapy," died surrounded by his beloved family, who always dedicated themselves to inheriting his academic legacy.

Like Sisyphus, we might as well imagine that they all had joy in their hearts and perhaps secretly hoped for a little luck.

Translator: Teresa