There Are No Miracles
We spend a lot of our lives waiting for a big break, and we go to church and pray for a hundred thousand dollars at three in the morning that will change everything overnight, and all of us want one day to meet a million dollars in one go because that is how most of us imagine becoming wealthy. But in reality, there are no miracles, and statistically we have not seen a single miracle that holds up to any kind of serious scrutiny, because every historical anomaly has eventually been explained by science. What we call a miracle is just something we do every day, disguised by time and distance, and the real problem is that we have organized our lives around the hope of a sudden transformation that almost never comes.
The Myth of the Big Break
When we look at how people actually succeed, we see a completely different pattern. The person who gets a job is not the person who was handed a position while sitting around waiting, but the person who applied consistently every single day for months, and most of us wish that one day we could be sitting down when someone simply says you are hired, but that job is always gotten by someone who refused to stop applying. A house is not bought in one lump sum by most people, because a house is built one brick at a time, a foundation is poured and then cured and then framed, and the roof goes on long after the walls are up. No single brick is the miracle, and the miracle is actually the thousandth brick laid on top of the nine hundred and ninety‑nine before it.
What we have come to realize is that success is incremental, and incremental success is actually better than the big break, because a big three hundred and sixty degree turn might happen for some people and some of us will get a life‑changing opportunity, but not all of us will, and we cannot organize our lives around the hope of a windfall. We have to live in the everyday reality that this is probably it, and the question becomes how we make today a miracle, a small repeatable merit that will make tomorrow slightly more miraculous than today.
The Eighth Wonder of the World
There is a saying accredited to Einstein that says compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, and the idea is that our actions today and our savings today and our small daily disciplines can increase exponentially by an order of magnitude simply through patience and repetition. If we look at Warren Buffett, the vast majority of his wealth came after the age of sixty‑five, not because he discovered a secret formula in his sixties but because the actions he took before that age, the reading, the investing, the waiting, and the refusing to chase miracles, were preparing the ground for everything that came after. There are no miracles, only compound interest applied to daily choices, and this is true not just for money but for relationships, education, governance, and politics.
Relationships Are Built, Not Found
Love whom you chose, instead of choosing whom you love - Mtho (probably)
In relationships, there is no turning point where we wake up next to the perfect person, and there is no single conversation that fixes everything. What exists is the I love you said on a Tuesday morning when we are tired, the attention we choose to hold during a difficult conversation, the way we speak to each other when no one is watching, and the shared goals we revisit over breakfast. These are not dramatic gestures but small, almost boring acts of care, and after ten years we look across the table and realize that we have shaped each other into people we love forever, or we have drifted apart, but either way it was never one big moment and it was always ten thousand tiny ones.
Beware of Political Revolutionaries
We make the same mistake with politics, because all of us want a politician who will change our country overnight, a savior or a revolutionary who walks in and fixes everything with a single speech or a single policy, but there are no miracles in governance either. What we actually need is a politician who will not steal today, who will not misappropriate funds today, who will not do his friend a favor at the expense of the country today, and who will not start a war with another country today. That kind of politician, the boring honest reliable one, is just as important as the generation‑defining leader who comes along once in a century, and perhaps more important, because a nation is not transformed by one heroic act but by thousands of days of refusing to be corrupt, refusing to be cruel, and refusing to take shortcuts.
Living in the Hope of Today
At some point, we have to stop living in the hope of changing the world and start living in the hope of changing today, because today is a miracle not because something extraordinary happened but because we showed up and did the small thing that needed to be done. We sent the application, we saved the brick, we spoke kindly, we refused the bribe, we read one more page, and we waited one more year. If we do that enough times, people will look back at our lives and call it luck or call it a miracle or say we had a big break, but we will know the truth. We built it one brick at a time, and there were never any miracles at all, just today and today again, and then one day a life that looks nothing like the one we started with. That is enough, and that is more than enough, and that is the only real miracle there has ever been.
P.S
Please watch “Hope in Every Box” from my favourite YouTube animated series, People Watching.