Two Lottery Tickets

This morning I was in the shower, enjoying the fact that the water was hot.

Not in a profound way. The way you stand on a cold Monday and think: nice. Hot water. On tap. In my house.

Then the thought cascaded. Canalised water. A roof. Electricity that doesn't flicker. Two kids sleeping in the next room. A wife I still love after all this time. A job I want to go to.

I noticed this because it isn't my default. My default is the opposite. I'm good at scanning for what could go wrong, and bad at standing in the middle of what's going right. The hot water had tricked me into inventory mode.

I counted for maybe four minutes. I came out of the shower richer than I went in.

The Framing

I'm a multi-billionaire. Not in euros.

If you measure wealth in luck, the kind that compounds quietly across a life, I'm off the charts.

I've won the lottery twice.

The first ticket is the family I'm building. My wife. Vasco, 10. Vicente, 3. That they exist, and that they let me into their days, is a jackpot most people spend a lifetime hoping for. That ticket gets its own post. Maybe several.

This one is about the second.

The Second Ticket

You don't pick your colleagues.

You show up on a Monday. On paper it's a transaction: a desk, a laptop, a Slack handle.

Somehow the same process delivered me Gabriel, Ricardo, Nixo, Fábio, Nelson and Bruno, before. Vita, Michal, Adriano, Pankaj, and Sahana, after.

I'm not going to tell you one story per person. That's not the piece. The piece is that when I sit down and list the things I have that I didn't earn, these names are on the list.

Cumplicidade

The word doesn't translate cleanly. I'm keeping it.

It's the fact that we share our vulnerabilities and they don't become weapons. It's one-for-all-all-for-one without any of us being dramatic about it. It's the default assumption that if something is hard for one of us, we carry it together until it isn't.

They're brilliant. I mean that in the strict sense of the word, not the LinkedIn one. Genuinely smart. Enormously experienced. Humble enough that you wouldn't guess either from a first meeting.

Gabriel and Ricardo taught me, practically everything I know about my craft. I learned by being near them and paying attention. They had the patience to let me be bad at things until I wasn't.

A handful of the important decisions in my life were shaped in conversations with them. I'll leave that there. One reference is enough.

The Math

Here's the quiet, unfair thing about the second ticket: I didn't buy it.

I showed up. I did the work. I tried, most days, to be the kind of colleague I'd want sitting next to me. But I didn't pick these people. They arrived. A few of them were intimidating on day one, and honestly, still are. In the good way. The kind that makes you sharper before the next meeting.

If the first ticket is the family I'm building, the second is the family that keeps showing up. Different arithmetic. Same impossible odds.

The Debt

I owe them. A lot. It isn't the kind of debt I can pay back, and I've stopped trying to calculate it.

What I can do is pay it sideways. Be the colleague who remembers the kid's name. Review the PR at a human pace, with kindness. Say the quiet thing out loud in the 1-on-1. Be genuinely happy when something good happens to someone next to me.

And tell them, every so often, out loud, that I owe them so much.

Note to Self

Future me: the world is going to keep being easy to read as dark. That read comes for free. The harder one, the more accurate one, is the one you did in the shower this morning.

Hot water. Two kids. A wife. Eleven names.

Future Samuel, please, don't forget this list.