Did you know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t the original targets for the atomic bomb?

The first choices were Kyoto and Kokura.

Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, was meant to be wiped from existence. It was an ideal target - a political, cultural, and industrial hub. But one man, Henry Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War, had a different perspective. Decades earlier, he had visited Kyoto on his honeymoon. He had walked its streets, admired its temples, and felt its history. He couldn’t bring himself to sign off on its destruction. And just like that, Kyoto was saved - not by military logic, but by personal sentiment.

Kokura’s fate was even more arbitrary. On August 9, 1945, the U.S. bomber carrying the second atomic bomb approached the city. The mission was clear. But when the plane arrived, the sky was obscured by clouds and smoke from nearby bombings. Visibility was too poor. After three unsuccessful passes, the crew was running low on fuel. They turned toward their backup target: Nagasaki. That was the moment history shifted. A different weather pattern, a few minutes of wind, and today we might be talking about the bombing of Kokura instead.

Finished reading Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters & like Fooled by Randomness, it only deepened my understanding of how little control we actually have. In both books, Brian Klaas and Nassim Nicholas Taleb dismantle our obsession with causality: the comforting but false belief that outcomes happen for clear, logical reasons. We love to think that history is shaped by strategy, intelligence, and foresight. But more often, it is shaped by accidents, near-misses, and random events, many of which are invisible to us at the time.

Taleb warns that we construct narratives after the fact to make randomness seem like inevitability. Klaas takes this idea and applies it to the grand stage of history. The atomic bombings, events that feel like the product of careful military planning, ultimately came down to one man’s travel nostalgia and an inconvenient cloud formation.

The same logic applies to our own lives. We tell ourselves that our careers, relationships, and successes are the result of careful decisions. But if we trace them back, we often find a series of flukes - an email we that we sent, a conversation that happened by chance, a meeting that we missed. We like to think we are in control, but more often than not, we are Kokura, waiting to see if the clouds will save us.

So what can we do? If randomness is unavoidable, the smartest response isn’t to fight it, it’s to increase our exposure to it. The more opportunities we create, the more likely luck will work in our favor. That’s the lesson I take from Fluke and Fooled by Randomness: instead of obsessing over control, we should optimize for serendipity. Because the most important moments in life rarely announce themselves. And the biggest flukes, the ones that change everything, are only visible in hindsight.