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I believe a lot can be said of a person's likelihood to succeed by watching them play Scrabble. If the person, like me, is always waiting for the perfect opportunity to use their Zs, Qs and Js and if they pass up on opportunities to place them on the board for moderate points in the hope that a currently missing tile may arrive and give them a triple letter triple word score taking them way beyond the others, then that person may like major steps in their career. They are likely to either make spectacular successes in their life (of which there is a slim chance) or they are likely to end up losers with points being deducted for missed opportunities which have turned into adversities instead.

On the other hand, if the person is willing to make the most of the current situation, living in the present, not saving up their Zs and Qs, but instead using them to inch their score up every time, then they might only be moderately successful, but successful nevertheless. Even if they fall back, they won't be far behind other moderately successful people.

Idealists turn out to be either mega successes or failures. They either make it big or don't make it at all. I'm not saying that the world is no place for idealists. I'm only saying that idealists stake out too much; their gamble is too big and their risks are too great. Chance could play a major part in their lives.

Was it not Marx who said "If you are not an idealist by age 20 you have no heart; if you are still an idealist by age 40, then you have no brain."

As a young boy in India walking to his school, I used to wonder how drivers could tell if they were on a one-way street. It was ok for vehicles trying to enter the street from the wrong end --- A no-entry sign will prevent them from getting in. But that is not enough, of course. Vehicles coming in from the other side need to be told that they are entering a one-way street too. What if a vehicle on a one-way street suddenly wanted to turn around and go back? But in the city where I come from, the transport department must have wisely decided to save money by relying on people's observational skills. There were no signs at the entrances to one-way streets. There were only ``No-entry'' signs at their exits. I guess it makes sense because the traffic was usually so dense that you can tell one-way streets by just looking at them. There was no chance of traffic ever making it an inch ahead in the wrong direction. However, there is a fine line between impossible and illegal and that is precisely what I set out to exploit. I decided to expose the loophole in the legal system by showing that I couldn't be prosecuted by law although I had done something obviously illegal.