John Anthony's Wager

Do you believe in destiny? I see a lot of philosophical stuff on my Facebook newsfeed and it seems people fall into one of two camps: the "your destiny is already written" camp and the "there is no destiny, you need to work hard to achieve your dreams" camp. Neither one is provably wrong as you could site countless examples of people who have become successful by going with the flow and who have clawed and scratched their way to success. So I've come up with an outlook that I'll just call John Anthony's Wager.

In case you've never heard of Pascal's Wager, basically in a nutshell it says that given the choice between believing in God or not, logic would dictate you should because your downside is the least compared to the alternative choices. If you are right, you would live a fortuitous life and be greeted with open arms at the Pearly Gates. If you were wrong, well you may have missed out on doing some less than fortuitous deeds, but you would still live a great and fruitful life.

Similarly, my wager is this. Given the choice between believing in a written destiny or not, you would be best suited to work hard everyday in the anticipation that there isn't. The reason is because if you are right, you will have worked hard your entire life to achieve your dreams and will have a better shot at achieving them. If you are wrong and there IS such thing as destiny, then any attempt contrary to your destiny will be rightfully thwarted and you'll end up fulfilling your destiny anyways once you do find yourself on the right path. Not only that, you will have developed great habits and character along the way. Its a "heads you win, tails you don't lose" scenario.