People Who Experienced "One-In-A-Million" Situations Share Their Fascinating Stories

"You can control what you put into your body. You can control your water intake and the foods you choose. You can choose to exercise or be sedentary. In most cases, there are good or bad decisions you can make. And the biggest one is that you can choose your mindset about things," health and fitness coach Anna told Bored Panda. However, some things are entirely outside of our control.

"That said, as someone with an autoimmune disease that I didn't choose, there are always hereditary factors that you may need to work around. Some people won't be able to make great choices. For a year I lived off mostly potatoes because that was what I could stomach. Staying positive is what got me through that," she revealed.

The coach pointed out that feeling jealous that someone has advantages that we don't is "totally fair," however, it also doesn't help you.

"I absolutely wish I didn't have to have digestive issues that took years to figure out and go through the pain and trial and error medication, but I also knew it could have been worse," Anna said.

"I stayed positive (faith helps if you're a believer because it gives you someone to turn to) and I was grateful that I was alive. Any feelings you have are real and that's ok, but don't let yourself be taken over by them."

Meanwhile, if you feel like you're stuck in an endless loop of failure after failure, it's vital that you reach out for assistance. A helping hand can make all the difference in the world. You don't have to do everything all on your own.

"Ask for help! I struggle with this, but it is so important to talk to people and get another perspective, whether it's a therapist or loved one. Also reading empowerment books, though you need the right mindset for that to be helpful."

As paradoxical as it might seem—rare events happen all the time. Think of it as a math problem. There are countless things happening on Planet Earth every single day. It’s only a matter of time until something that we consider to be ‘rare’ occurs. Like someone getting struck by lightning and just walking it off. Someone surviving a plane crash. Someone winning the lottery. Or someone being born on a date that some would say bodes significance.

In other words, one-in-a-million events are at the same time extremely rare and very commonplace. This is something that one of the moderators at the r/nevertellmetheodds subreddit explained to Bored Panda earlier. You’ve got to keep an eye on probabilities and recognize the fact that many people believe in things like numerology magic.

"If you shuffle a deck of 52 playing cards, the arrangement you get is one in about 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So it's super improbable if you look at it that way. But it's also kind of trivial, which is why we would remove a post that's just 'I shuffled this deck of cards and the result I got will never, ever happen again,'” they told Bored Panda.

"That's obviously a trivial example, but think of things like, 'Yesterday I ate one egg for breakfast, found two pennies on the floor, passed three ambulances on my way to work, got four phone calls before lunch, and got five texts during lunch. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!' It sounds like numerology magic but really that person just ignored the nine socks in their drawer and the eleven emails they got in the afternoon because those didn't contribute to the 'miracle.’ Wild coincidences are one thing. Genuinely interesting ones that aren't trivial like the deck of cards or reverse-engineered like the 1-2-3-4-5 day at work are different and special,” the mod explained to us.

The people affected by these rare events, however, tend to think that they’ve been either incredibly lucky or have bad luck. Professor Suzanne Degges-White, from Northern Illinois University, explained to Bored Panda during a previous interview that believing in fate and luck are interwoven into our history as human beings.

"As long as there have been humans, there has been a desire to imagine that somewhere some thing or some being or some force is helping direct us along our paths to a positive destination. Many people want to believe in luck because that gives us hope that one day maybe it will be 'our turn' to win the lottery, find true love, be at the right place at the right moment."

One upside of believing in luck is that it helps people handle the disappointments that they’re faced in life. What’s more, it can keep our hope alive that a better future awaits us! However, at the same time, someone might use this as an excuse to take responsibility for their actions: they might say that they’re a victim of bad luck and _totally_ aren’t dealing with the consequences of their actions. So believing in luck becomes a double-edged sword if you give up on the idea that you have any control over anything.

Furthermore, the professor pointed out that “life has a funny way of confirming our self-biases.”

"If we believe we're going to fail at something, we've already set ourselves up for failure. Believing that we carry bad luck around like a cloud gives us a reason not to do our best, not to try our hardest, and to make it 'okay' to fail. While we'd think that a strong belief in good luck would work totally in our favor, there are drawbacks to this belief, too," she explained how this sort of thinking works.

"When we don't take ownership of our good choices, our effective actions, or our hard work, we are selling ourselves short. It's true that sometimes circumstances can 'work in our favor,' or we can meet the right person at the right time, but we still need to recognize our own part in taking advantage of positive circumstances or setting things up so that we can succeed." Taking ownership of good and bad decisions allows us to move past the idea that we’re ‘victims’ of life or luck.

"Research suggests that the people who have 'good luck' are just being more aware of their surroundings, making smart decisions based on current conditions, and actually 'believe' that good things will happen for them. That's a positive bias in our favor—we look for the good, so we're more likely to see it."