The Strange Relationship Between Silence and Luck

A few years ago, I bought a used MacBook.

Not because it was the best MacBook I could buy.

It wasn’t.

By the time I bought it, Apple had already moved on to newer generations. The M3 was out. The M4 was beginning to appear in the videos I watched late at night.

But the machine I bought was still, objectively, a very good one.

An M1 with 1TB of storage.

I had saved for it.

And because I had paid for it with money I had slowly accumulated myself, it meant more to me than its specifications probably deserved.

I used it for almost everything.

And, occasionally, I posted it.

A photo here.

A desk setup there.

Nothing particularly serious.

Just a small way of saying:

I finally have this.

Then I started watching videos about the M4.

And, as people do, I began imagining the upgrade.

Maybe I could sell the M1.

Maybe I could add some money.

Maybe, eventually, I could get the newer machine.

I didn’t do it.

The decision was still somewhere between a thought and a wish.

Then the M1 broke.

Not gradually.

Not conveniently.

It became one of those unexpected expenses that suddenly makes you look at your savings differently.

I remember being stressed because the money I had spent to buy that machine represented a significant portion of what I had managed to save.

And there was something almost ironic about it.

I had been thinking about replacing it because I wanted something newer.

Instead, I lost the thing I already had.

Later, I received a project large enough to cover the cost of a new MacBook.

The strange part was that this was almost exactly what I had wanted before.

Only the route was completely different.

I had imagined:

sell the old MacBook → add money → buy the new one.

What actually happened was:

keep the old MacBook → lose it → struggle → receive an unexpected project → buy the new one.

I never posted the project.

It exists on my CV and LinkedIn because those are records of work.

But I never made a post about it.

No announcement.

No screenshot.

No “grateful for this opportunity.”

Nothing.

I simply bought the machine and continued working.

I didn’t think much of that decision at the time.

But looking backward, I realize this is one of many stories that eventually made me notice something strange about my own life.

The things I talked about too early seemed to become complicated.

The things I kept quiet about seemed to have a strange tendency to work out.

I know how that sounds.

And I don’t mean it literally.

I don’t believe that posting a photo causes a MacBook to break.

I don’t believe that telling your friends about a job automatically makes the job disappear.

And I certainly don’t believe that silence is some kind of algorithm for receiving blessings.

I have no evidence for any of that.

What I have is a pattern.

And after enough years, I became curious about it.

The pattern, stated as carefully as I can

I am not going to pretend this is a controlled experiment.

One person’s memory is not a dataset.

There is no control group.

No randomized trial.

No statistical significance.

There is simply one life, remembered by the person who lived it.

And that is probably one of the least reliable datasets imaginable.

Still, here is what I noticed.

When I showed the process — the applications, the plans, the projects, the things I was excited about before they were finished — the outcome often disappointed me.

When I said little, worked quietly, and allowed the result to arrive before explaining it to anyone, the outcome often surprised me.

Usually in the direction I wanted.

I cannot tell whether silence caused anything.

I actually suspect that it didn’t.

But I have lived inside this pattern for long enough that I no longer want to dismiss it as coincidence without at least asking what might be underneath it.

Maybe the relationship is psychological.

Maybe it is statistical.

Maybe it is simply confirmation bias.

Maybe it is luck.

Maybe it is faith.

Maybe it is some combination of all five.

And perhaps the most interesting possibility is that I am asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question isn’t:

“Why do good things disappear when I talk about them?”

Maybe it is:

“Why do I keep discovering how little control I actually have over the outcome?”

I was living through a “golden age” that did not feel golden

I started building my career around 2020.

Looking backward, the technology industry was going through extraordinary years.

There was enormous optimism.

New companies appeared.

Funding was abundant.

Software was everywhere.

Remote work accelerated.

Technology seemed to be the place to be.

But I did not experience those years as a golden age.

I experienced them as a sequence of failures.

I applied for jobs.

I was rejected.

I built things.

Some went nowhere.

I joined competitions.

I put enormous effort into projects that eventually disappeared.

I tried again.

And again.

For several years, my income depended heavily on moving from one project to the next.

There was no certainty that the next one would arrive.

I remember looking at people who had what seemed to me like a very ordinary, fixed monthly income.

I remember thinking:

When will it be my turn?

It wasn’t really envy.

It was more like exhaustion disguised as comparison.

I didn’t want to be richer than them.

I wanted the feeling they seemed to have:

certainty.

A number that would arrive every month.

A reason to stop wondering.

That period taught me something I didn’t understand at the time.

A favorable industry does not guarantee a favorable life.

The macro story and the personal story can be completely different.

Then something happened that looked almost too specific

At some point, I stopped asking for something vague.

I became very specific about what I wanted.

I wanted to stay close to my family.

I wanted to remain in the same city.

I wanted work that gave me enough stability without consuming my entire life.

I wanted enough space to keep building things independently.

I didn’t want some extraordinary dream.

I wanted something that fit.

And then an opportunity appeared through someone I already knew.

Not through a job application.

Not through a recruiter.

Not through a carefully engineered personal-branding strategy.

A friend simply offered me a position.

And somehow, almost uncomfortably precisely, it matched the wish.

The city.

The pace.

The flexibility.

The kind of work.

Even the income was close to what I had imagined.

Looking backward, there is a perfectly rational explanation.

Years earlier, I had participated in a competition.

That experience introduced me to people I otherwise would never have met.

Those relationships accumulated.

One person knew another.

One opportunity created another.

Eventually, one of those connections became the person who called me.

Nothing supernatural is required to explain it.

It is networking.

It is social capital.

It is the snowball effect of decisions made years earlier.

But that explanation still leaves me with a strange feeling.

Because I didn’t engineer the chain.

I only participated in some of its earliest steps.

The rest happened through other people, timing, circumstances, and decisions I did not control.

This is where Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness became interesting to me.

Taleb repeatedly warns against our tendency to construct neat explanations around outcomes that contain much more randomness than we would like to admit.

When something succeeds, we look backward and identify the reasons.

Discipline.

Intelligence.

Strategy.

Persistence.

Networking.

All of those things can be real.

But so can luck.

And luck is difficult to see precisely because, by definition, it is not something we completely control.

The wish was fulfilled.

The problem was that I was still me.

For a while, I thought the opportunity had solved everything.

It gave me the stability I had wanted.

But then another problem appeared.

The work itself became repetitive.

The freelance work I had hoped would continue alongside it became quieter.

New projects stopped arriving.

Financially, I was safer.

Professionally, I felt myself becoming still.

And that created another paradox.

I had spent years wishing for exactly this kind of stability.

Now I had it.

And I was restless.

It made me realize something uncomfortable:

A wish can be fulfilled exactly as requested and still be incomplete.

Sometimes we ask for safety when what we actually need is growth.

Sometimes we ask for stability when what we actually want is meaning.

Sometimes we ask for a door to open without realizing we haven’t decided where we want to go once we walk through it.

So, quietly, I started looking again.

Another opportunity arrived while I was barely talking about it

The next opportunity followed a strangely similar pattern.

Someone I already knew mentioned another possibility.

I went through a simple process.

I explained what I had done.

Then nothing happened.

A week passed.

Then another.

Then another.

Eventually, almost a month had gone by.

I could have asked.

I could have followed up.

I could have tried to force an answer.

But I didn’t.

Partly because I was tired.

Partly because I had become more comfortable with uncertainty.

And partly because somewhere along the way I had developed a strange instinct:

If something is mine, I don’t need to chase it into existence.

That sentence is not particularly scientific.

It may not even be good advice.

But it has become part of how I think about things.

Eventually, the call came.

And the opportunity turned out to be much larger than I had initially imagined.

It was the kind of work I had wanted for years:

more responsibility,

more technical depth,

more room to learn,

and, importantly, the feeling that what I was doing actually mattered to someone beyond myself.

I learned things I had never expected to learn.

I worked with people much more experienced than me.

I found myself in rooms where I had to contribute rather than simply observe.

And that experience created another realization.

For a long time, I had unconsciously associated dignity with status.

I thought there were jobs that were impressive and jobs that weren’t.

Then life gave me a strange contrast.

There were days when I did very ordinary work.

And there were other days when I sat in serious technical discussions, surrounded by people with far more experience than I had, expected to help solve difficult problems.

At first, I found the contrast almost absurd.

Eventually, I became grateful for it.

Because I learned that work does not become less dignified because it is less prestigious.

Cleaning a room is work.

Answering a call is work.

Writing software is work.

Solving a difficult technical problem is work.

Managing people is work.

The title changes.

The human dignity doesn’t.

Why did I become so private?

This is where the story becomes less philosophical and more personal.

I don’t talk much about my work publicly.

I don’t usually tell people exactly what I am doing.

I am uncomfortable when someone casually asks:

“So, where are you working now?”

It is not because I have nothing to be proud of.

It is almost the opposite.

I have learned to be careful with things that are still in motion.

Some of that is probably wisdom.

Some of it is probably fear.

I have experienced enough failures, disappointments, and situations where being visible did not end well that privacy eventually became a habit.

And there is an important distinction here.

There is a difference between:

privacy because something is valuable

and

privacy because you are afraid something will be taken away.

I am still trying to figure out which one describes me.

Probably both.

The strange psychology of saying things out loud

Years after I first noticed this pattern, I came across a study by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues.

The title alone caught my attention:

When Intentions Go Public.

Published in Psychological Science in 2009, the study examined what happens when other people become aware of our identity-related intentions.

The results were counterintuitive.

Across several experiments, intentions that had been noticed by other people were translated into action less intensively than intentions that had remained unnoticed.

One explanation was particularly interesting:

when other people recognize us as someone who intends to become a certain kind of person, that recognition can create a premature sense of possessing the identity we are trying to achieve.

That made me stop.

Because maybe some of the things I experienced had nothing to do with the universe taking something away.

Maybe sometimes, when we announce what we are going to become, we receive a small psychological reward before we have actually become it.

We say:

I’m building this.

People respond:

That’s amazing.

We say:

I’m applying everywhere.

People encourage us.

We say:

I’m going to become this kind of person.

And suddenly, part of the emotional reward has already arrived.

The finish line has not moved.

But something inside us has relaxed.

That doesn’t mean public accountability is bad.

It doesn’t mean you should never share your goals.

It doesn’t mean posting your work makes you less likely to succeed.

The research is much narrower than that.

But it gave me a plausible explanation for something I had experienced intuitively:

sometimes recognition can arrive before achievement.

And perhaps that is not always helpful.

But psychology still doesn’t explain the timing

It explains one part.

It doesn’t explain why the opportunity appeared when it did.

It doesn’t explain why one connection from years ago suddenly mattered.

It doesn’t explain why a project arrived after I had already accepted that the old one was probably gone.

It doesn’t explain why a specific wish was sometimes answered through a route I could never have planned.

For that, I have another framework.

Faith.

Rizq rarely arrives through the route you planned

There is a verse I keep returning to:

“And whoever is mindful of Allah, He will make a way out for them, and provide for them from sources they could never imagine.”

— Qur’an 65:2–3

The verse continues:

“And whoever relies upon Allah — then He is sufficient for him. Indeed, Allah will accomplish His purpose.”

This verse means something different to me now than it did when I was younger.

Because rizq is easy to reduce to salary.

But my experience has made that definition feel too small.

Rizq can be a person remembering you.

A friend making a phone call.

A relationship formed years ago becoming useful at exactly the right moment.

A project arriving when a financial problem becomes urgent.

An opportunity appearing from a direction you weren’t looking toward.

I can call all of these things networking.

Social capital.

Timing.

Probability.

Snowball effects.

Those explanations are valid.

But I can also call them rizq.

I don’t think those explanations have to fight each other.

Perhaps the mechanism is human.

And the source is still Allah.

Maybe I was never supposed to understand the mechanism

This is where I think about luck.

Robert Frank’s Success and Luck argues against the idea that successful outcomes can be explained entirely through individual merit. Circumstances, timing, and chance can have an enormous effect on where effort eventually leads.

That resonates with me because I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the language of pure self-made success.

I worked hard.

But other people helped me.

Timing helped me.

Circumstances helped me.

I was given opportunities.

I had advantages I did not create.

I met people I could not have predicted.

And there were probably dozens of people who worked just as hard as I did and simply didn’t receive the same openings.

That realization doesn’t make me feel less proud of the work.

It makes me less interested in taking all the credit.

Maybe humility is not thinking:

I did nothing.

Maybe humility is thinking:

I did my part. I just wasn’t the only variable.

And then there is `ayn

There is also something in the Islamic tradition that makes my instinct toward discretion feel familiar.

The Qur’an teaches believers to seek refuge from:

“the evil of an envier when he envies.”

— Qur’an 113:5

And in Sahih Muslim, the Prophet ﷺ affirmed that the evil eye is real.

I want to be careful here.

I do not believe every failed project was caused by someone’s envy.

I don’t believe my broken MacBook was automatically ‘ayn.

I don’t believe that posting a photograph gives another person some supernatural power over my life.

That would be paranoia, not faith.

But Islam does recognize envy as something real enough that believers are taught to seek protection from it.

So perhaps discretion has a place.

Not because I am afraid of everyone.

Not because every blessing must be hidden.

But because not everything valuable needs an audience.

There is also a beautiful hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari describing one of the people who will receive Allah’s shade as someone whose charity is so private that “his left hand does not know what his right hand has given.”

The hadith is specifically about charity.

I don’t want to turn it into a rule saying that jobs, salaries, projects, or possessions must be hidden.

But it reminds me of something important:

Islam does not treat visibility as an inherent virtue.

Sometimes something is more beautiful precisely because it doesn’t need to be seen.

This is where I disagree with “build in public”

I understand the argument for personal branding.

I really do.

Show your work.

Document what you learn.

Build an audience.

Share your process.

Create opportunities.

All of those things can work.

And I have benefited from some of them myself.

But I don’t think visibility should become a requirement for legitimacy.

You can build a career without turning your entire life into content.

You can have ambition without constantly announcing it.

You can succeed without making every success public.

And you can be proud of something without asking other people to validate it.

Maybe personal branding is a tool.

Not a personality.

Not a moral obligation.

Not proof that you are moving forward.

There is a difference between documenting your work and performing your life.

I am increasingly interested in the first.

And increasingly uncomfortable with the second.

Maybe God wasn’t humbling me

For a long time, I interpreted the pattern differently.

I thought:

Whenever I become too proud, Allah humbles me.

Maybe.

But I don’t actually know that.

And the older I become, the more careful I am about claiming to know the reason behind a particular event.

Maybe the broken MacBook was a test.

Maybe it was simply a broken MacBook.

Maybe a failed project was a lesson.

Maybe it was simply a failed project.

Maybe an unexpected opportunity was a reward.

Maybe it was the accumulated consequence of years of relationships and work.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that these events repeatedly reminded me that I am not in control.

And perhaps that is enough.

The Qur’an says:

“If you are grateful, I will surely give you more.”

— Qur’an 14:7

I don’t interpret that as:

Be quiet online and Allah will increase your salary.

That would be superstition disguised as religion.

I understand it more simply.

Be grateful for what has already arrived.

Because gratitude changes the relationship between you and what you have.

I used to think the goal was to arrive

When I was younger, I wanted specific things.

A job.

Then a better job.

A project.

Then a better project.

A stable income.

Then a larger income.

A better laptop.

Then a better laptop again.

Eventually, even the car I still dream about.

There was always another number.

Another object.

Another milestone.

And I kept thinking:

Once I get there, I’ll feel finished.

I don’t think that anymore.

I am 26.

I have more financial stability than I once imagined.

I have opportunities I could not have predicted five years ago.

And yet I still feel like I am somewhere in the middle.

There are skills I haven’t learned.

Things I haven’t built.

Risks I haven’t taken.

Dreams I haven’t reached.

The car is still a dream.

And that’s okay.

Because perhaps a life is not supposed to feel like a completed project.

What I think the pattern actually taught me

I don’t think the lesson is:

Never tell anyone your plans.

That would be too simplistic.

I think the lesson is closer to:

Be specific about what you want, but don’t become addicted to being seen wanting it.

Ask.

Work.

Build.

Pray.

Then let the outcome breathe.

There is a difference between ambition and announcement.

There is a difference between confidence and performance.

There is a difference between gratitude and showing off.

And there is a difference between privacy and fear.

I am still learning all four.

Faith and be specific

If I had to compress the last six years into one sentence, this would probably be it:

Faith and be specific.

Be specific about what you want.

Not because specificity guarantees that you will receive it.

But because it allows you to recognize the answer when it comes.

Work toward it.

Not because effort controls the outcome.

But because effort is the part that belongs to you.

Pray for it.

Not because prayer is a transaction.

But because there are things effort will never be able to control.

And then accept that the final form of the answer may look completely different from what you imagined.

Perhaps the job comes through a friend.

Perhaps the project comes after the thing you bought breaks.

Perhaps the opportunity comes months after the interview.

Perhaps the thing you wanted is given to you, only to reveal that you actually wanted something else.

Perhaps the answer is not:

“Here is exactly what you asked for.”

Perhaps it is:

“Here is what I know you need.”

I don’t know.

And maybe that is what tawakkul actually feels like when you stop reducing it to a motivational quote.

You do your part.

And you leave room for Allah to write the rest.

What I still can’t prove

I want to end this the way I would end a technical investigation:

by naming the weaknesses in my own hypothesis.

This is a sample of one life.

I am remembering events after they happened.

That alone makes me vulnerable to confirmation bias.

Maybe I have forgotten the things I announced that worked perfectly.

Maybe I remember the failures because they were more emotionally painful.

Maybe the pattern is real.

Maybe it isn’t.

Daniel Kahneman’s work on human judgment reminds us how easily we construct coherent stories from incomplete evidence.

Taleb makes a similar warning from another direction: successful outcomes can make randomness look like skill, while unsuccessful outcomes disappear from the stories we tell.

So I don’t want to claim that I have discovered some universal law.

I haven’t.

There are people who announce every dream and achieve it.

There are people who keep everything private and still fail.

There are people who work incredibly hard and remain stuck because circumstances simply don’t cooperate.

Their stories matter too.

My experience cannot explain theirs.

I just know that I became quieter

Maybe that is all this essay is really about.

Not silence.

Not luck.

Not even success.

Maybe it is about becoming less interested in controlling the narrative.

I don’t need everyone to know what I am working on.

I don’t need every achievement to become a post.

I don’t need to prove that I am progressing.

Some things can simply happen.

Some blessings can remain between me and Allah.

Some ambitions can remain unfinished.

Some dreams can stay private until they become real.

And if they never become real, perhaps they were still worth having.

For the person still waiting

There are probably people reading this who are still where I was a few years ago.

Applying.

Waiting.

Getting rejected.

Watching other people’s lives move forward.

Wondering:

When is it going to be my turn?

I remember that feeling.

And I don’t want to give you the dishonest version of encouragement.

I cannot promise that everything will work out.

I cannot promise that every rejection is secretly preparing something better.

I cannot promise that silence will make your dreams arrive faster.

I cannot even promise that hard work will always be rewarded proportionally.

Life is more complicated than that.

What I can say is this:

Be specific about what you want.

Do the work.

Make the dua.

Don’t measure your timeline against someone else’s.

Protect your peace.

And leave some room for a route you cannot see yet.

Because some of the most important things that happened to me did not arrive through the doors I was knocking on.

They arrived from somewhere else.

I am writing this because almost nobody will read it

There is something almost funny about ending an essay about visibility by publishing it somewhere that very few people may ever find.

But that is exactly why I wanted to write it here.

This isn’t a career announcement.

It isn’t a financial update.

It isn’t personal branding.

It isn’t a success story.

It is a timestamp.

A record of what I thought at 26.

Maybe future me will read this and realize that I was completely wrong.

Maybe I will become more comfortable sharing everything.

Maybe the pattern will disappear.

Maybe I’ll eventually laugh at the idea that silence had anything to do with luck.

I hope I do.

Because I don’t want superstition.

I want faith.

I don’t want fear.

I want discretion.

I don’t want to hide because I am afraid of losing something.

I want to be quiet because I understand that not everything needs an audience.

And perhaps most importantly, I don’t want to look at the life I have now and pretend that I built every part of it myself.

I worked.

I failed.

I tried again.

Other people helped.

Timing helped.

Luck helped.

And I believe Allah was there through all of it.

So for now, I am still asking.

Still working.

Still learning.

Still wanting.

Still waiting for some things.

Still grateful for others.

I don’t know where the story ends.

I don’t even know if this strange relationship between silence and luck is real.

But I know one thing now that I didn’t know at 20:

I don’t have to understand why something happened in order to be grateful that it did.

And maybe that is enough.

Alhamdulillah.