Have you seen the Gwyneth Paltrow movie, SLIDING DOORS? It features the inimitable Gwyneth, playing Helen, freshly fired from her corporate job, stumbling into a train station, still in shock. The movie parallels the life-altering consequences of Helen missing her train home. 

Brian Klaas moves the “sliding doors” theory one step further in FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters (on sale Jan 23). In it, Klaas demonstrates how linear ideas of progress are (at best) outmoded and suggests that “embracing the unpredictable” is not only more realistic—but is ultimately the key to happiness. Using history, evolutionary biology and chaos theory, Klaas shows how “letting go” is not only better for mental health, it can also be an empowering tool for success. The core argument of the book is that our world—and our lives—are more swayed by the accidental than we imagine. As people accustomed to recognizing patterns, we often wrongly weave unrelated data points together into a more pleasing tapestry. That is that the “storybook reality” produced by our modern simplified computer models, which systematically search for “the signal” and delete “the noise.”

Recall that for Gwyneth, her life was altered less by losing her corporate job than missing her train afterward.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

If you could rewind life and redo one moment, would everything turn out the same? Or could catching a train or missing an exit change your life—or history itself? Would you even know what to change, being blind to the radically different worlds you unknowingly left behind? 

In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small, chance events can divert our lives and change everything, by social scientist and Atlantic writer Brian Klaas.

In FLUKE: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters (on sale Jan 23rd, 2024), Klaas tackles these questions and changes the way we look at the world. Klaas encourages a shift away from our obsession with linear ideas about progress and suggests that embracing the unpredictable nature of life is not only a more reality-based outlook—but is the secret to happiness. For Klaas, all of our fates are inextricably linked to a web of people and events not only outside of our control, but not even within our purview whatsoever. Pull on one thread and it effects the whole web. It is these often random “flukes” that have outsized influence on our lives. Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, FLUKE provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen and offers lessons on living smarter, being happier, and learning to let things go.