"Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck." - Dalai Lama
Well, sometimes.
Ha, fair qualifier. The quote has a certain monastic optimism to it — easy to embrace in hindsight, harder when you're in the thick of disappointment.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle: sometimes the closed door really does lead you somewhere better, and sometimes it's just a closed door. The wisdom might be less about believing every setback is secretly a gift, and more about staying open enough that you don't let disappointment permanently narrow your path.
Though there's something to be said for the Dalai Lama's batting average on this one — looking back, most people can point to at least a few moments where not getting what they wanted turned out to be the best thing that happened to them. Even if it's not a universal law, it's a useful thing to remember when you're in the middle of "sometimes."
His having to leave Tibet, surely the second most important event in his life (the first of course becoming the Dalai Lama) was not what he would want and not a stroke of good luck. Still, he made the best of it.
That's a really sharp observation, and it exposes a certain irony in the quote. The man who said it lived through one of the more dramatic counterexamples imaginable — forced into exile from his homeland at 23, never able to return, watching Tibet's culture come under enormous pressure. That's not a hidden blessing; it's a genuine loss that he has acknowledged with grief throughout his life.
What you're pointing to is the difference between resilience and reframing. The Dalai Lama's actual life story is more a testament to the former — he didn't pretend exile was secretly good luck, he built something meaningful in spite of it. Dharamsala became a remarkable center of Tibetan culture and Buddhism precisely because of how he responded to circumstances he never would have chosen.
So the quote, taken too literally, risks becoming a kind of spiritual bypassing — a way of tidying up suffering with a bow. But his life tells a more honest and arguably more inspiring story: that you can face genuine, irreversible loss and still find purpose, still contribute, still even find joy — without pretending the loss wasn't real.
"Making the best of it," as you put it, is actually the harder and more honest achievement.
I was a surplus risk insurance underwriter for a couple of years, writing policies for exposures that standard companies avoid. The company was small and in trouble, and one day I read in the WSJ that it's assets have been seized by the state of Illinois (in this case the base state). A state can do that to a company it decides hasn't the ability to meet obligations. Well, there went my sweet job and nice office and all that, what will I do. When I arrived at work there were three phone messages from other companies asking me to come work for them, better salaries and stronger companies, and one was a quality reinsurer, far more important than surplus lines.
Now that's a clean example of the Dalai Lama's quote working exactly as advertised. And the timing makes it almost cinematic — the bad news and the good news arriving essentially simultaneously, before you even had time to properly panic.
What it also reflects is something the quote doesn't quite capture: the luck wasn't random. Those three calls came because you had built a reputation in a fairly specialized field. Surplus lines underwriting is not a crowded space — you were known, your skills were valued, and the market came to you. The "stroke of luck" was really the market recognizing competence that your failing employer had perhaps taken for granted.
The reinsurance opportunity is interesting too. Reinsurance sits behind the curtain of the whole industry — the insurer of insurers — and carries a certain prestige and complexity that surplus lines, for all its creativity, doesn't quite match. So not only did the floor fall out and hold, it actually rose.
Though I imagine on the morning you read that WSJ item, before you checked your messages, there was at least a moment of genuine "oh no." Which is the honest human experience the Dalai Lama's quote skips over — the gap between the bad news and the discovery that it wasn't, in the end, so bad. That gap can feel very long even when it turns out to be very short.
The offers were generated by the fact that they now knew I would be looking.
Of course — much simpler and more accurate than my romanticized version. The seized assets were public news, in the Wall Street Journal no less, so anyone in the industry who wanted to poach talent from a suddenly rudderless shop knew exactly when to call. It was opportunism on their part, well-timed, which happened to align perfectly with your need.
No mythology required. The market was just working — information became public, interested parties acted on it quickly. Your competence was presumably why they wanted you specifically, but the timing of those calls was just the industry reading the same newspaper you were.
It's actually a more satisfying story that way. No hidden cosmic plan, no silver lining theology — just the practical mechanics of a specialized labor market doing what it does, and you landing well because of it. The Dalai Lama might still claim it as evidence for his quote, but you clearly have no illusions about the machinery behind it.
A reinsurer would be very careful to not steal employees from its customers.
Ah, another assumption punctured. So the reinsurer call came from someone who wasn't in a client relationship with your firm — which makes sense, since reinsurers depend entirely on those relationships and would never risk one by poaching. They could approach you precisely because your employer was now effectively out of the picture, no longer a customer worth protecting.
And that actually adds an interesting wrinkle — the state seizure didn't just signal your availability, it also cleared you. The professional courtesy barrier that might have kept certain doors closed was removed the moment the company ceased to function as a going concern. You became approachable in a way you hadn't been the day before.
So the mechanics were even more specific than just "industry reads WSJ and calls." Different callers had different reasons for feeling free to reach out, and the reinsurer's reason was particular to how that world operates.
You're giving me a pretty efficient education in how that industry thinks.
You got it wrong again, a bit. Now that the company would be closed down, they could hire me since the company would no longer be a customer.
Right — not that they could approach you more freely, but that the customer relationship was simply ending, full stop. Once the company is being wound down, it's not a customer anymore, period. So there was no poaching, no awkwardness, no relationship to protect — just a clean opening that didn't exist the day before.
The distinction matters. It's not that they seized an opportunity in a gray area. It's that a door that was genuinely closed became genuinely open, through no maneuvering on anyone's part.
I spent the next week generating pro-rate cancellations of existing policies (normally there is a penalty for early cancellation, called short rate, but I systematically waived it under the circumstances).
That speaks well of you. The policyholders hadn't done anything wrong — they'd bought coverage in good faith from a company that turned out to be in trouble. Hitting them with a cancellation penalty on top of the disruption of losing their coverage would have been adding insult to injury.
And in a specialized field like surplus lines, where the exposures are unusual and the market is relatively small, how you handle the messy endings probably gets noticed and remembered just as much as how you handle the business going well.
I think that's pretty much standard practice even though there is no rule. My we are having a nice salmon colored dawn this morning.
A graceful exit from the insurance world then — nothing heroic, just the decent and customary thing done quietly.
And a salmon dawn in Phnom Penh sounds like a fine way to punctuate the conversation. Enjoy it.
The dawn is in rural Battambang looking at rice fields in their prime from my porch.
Even better. Rice fields at their prime have that particular lush, almost electric green that's hard to find anywhere else, and a salmon sky behind them must be something worth sitting still for.
Battambang is lovely country.
When I was with the surplus lines company I had a beard, and the reinsurer I had decided I wanted to join was a Kansas City outfit, very conservative. I decided it best that the beard go, and shaved it. General sigh of relief in KC that they didn't have to broach the matter.
A small but shrewd piece of social intelligence. You read the culture accurately, made the adjustment on your own terms before anyone had to say anything awkward, and everyone was spared the discomfort. The people in Kansas City probably liked you a little better for it without ever quite knowing why.
There's something almost diplomatic about it — solving a problem that hadn't yet been spoken aloud.
They did like me better and they did know why and they told me.
Ha — so much for the subtle unspoken relief. They were just straightforwardly grateful you'd shown up clean-shaven, and said so. A very Kansas City response, in its own way.
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