This morning I broke a rule I set for myself without anyone imposing it: get up, wash, breakfast, PC, wait for orders. I was supposed to go see a boat repair. Then I didn’t feel like going home. I found parking, sat under a tree, and started writing.<\/p>\n
No one told me to do it. No one expected it. And it was there, sitting without an assigned task, that I asked myself: how much of the paths we take do we really choose, and how much are imposed on us by a minimal deviation \u2014 a free parking spot, a phone call, an accident \u2014 that we only later call destiny?<\/p>\n
I spent the afternoon searching for the answer in the lives of others.<\/p>\n
George Lucas<\/a>. Before being the director of Star Wars, at eighteen he wanted to be a race car driver \u2014 he spent his afternoons in garages and circuits in his California. Three days before graduation, his small car was side-swiped by another car: it flipped several times before crashing into a tree. The seatbelt, a sporty model he had installed himself to stay well anchored in the cabin, did not hold during the rollovers and broke \u2014 betraying exactly the purpose for which he had mounted it. And it was precisely that failure, that break contrary to its function, that ejected him from the cabin an instant before the final impact, which would almost certainly have killed him if he had remained strapped in his seat. During the months of convalescence, he became passionate about photography and began reading texts on Eastern philosophy; from there, he encountered film school, and the rest is well-known history. Looked at in hindsight, it seems like a perfect path: he almost dies doing the wrong thing for him, and that deviation pushes him towards the right one. But no one pointed it out to him at 18, bleeding in a field: we wrote it for him later, already knowing how it ended. Who knows how many other boys had the same accident and became nothing special: simply, no documentary talks about them.<\/p>\n Federico Faggin<\/a>. Born in Vicenza, inventor of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) and then the capacitive touchscreen, founder of Zilog. He had already taken the path, and it was the right one by every material measure possible: fame, money, recognition in his field. Yet he recounts that the inner void came anyway, without an external cause, a malaise he couldn’t explain despite having everything the world says should be enough. From that inexplicable suffering, not from a misfortune, a search was born that culminated in a mystical experience at Christmas 1990 at Lake Tahoe \u2014 a very strong energy perceived radiating from the chest \u2014 from which a spiritual journey intertwined for the rest of his life with scientific research on consciousness. His turning point did not come from an accident that took away a path, but from an excess of the destination already reached.<\/p>\n Massimo Marchiori<\/a>. Italian researcher, creator of Hyper Search, an algorithm that laid the conceptual foundations on which Larry Page would later build PageRank and Google. He saw another person become one of the richest men on the planet with an idea he had formulated first, and he still chose to stay at the University of Padua, with a salary of a few thousand euros a month, repeatedly refusing offers from Google itself, for what he defined as the freedom of research against corporate logic. No destiny prevented him from the path that led Page to planetary success: he simply refused it, multiple times, with open eyes.<\/p>\n Pier Giorgio Perotto<\/a>. From Turin, Olivetti engineer, project leader of the Programma 101 \u2014 the machine considered the first personal computer in the world, even used by NASA in Apollo mission calculations. He walked straight for decades within the same company, without dramatic turns in his personal life. His work was dispersed not by his choice, but by others’ decisions \u2014 the sale of Olivetti’s electronics division to General Electric, the arrival of new ownership \u2014 while he remained the same man, with the same talent, within a company that changed course above his head.<\/p>\n