My life pivoted on a similar moment of whimsy. When I saw the post about the first startup school way back in the day, I just randomly decided "you know what, it's on the other side of the country but I'll just sign up and figure it out". Ended up flying to Boston on a super cheap flight, crashing on my friends couch who was in grad school at MIT, and meeting Steve and Alexis (of reddit), and that's how I ended up working for reddit 18 months later.
And yet, I can spend another 5 minutes in the grocery store agonizing over which of two near-identical bags of chips to buy. Funny how that goes.
I posted a bitchy comment using a throwaway account on Reddit about ten years ago.
It directly led to me moving across the country, getting hired at Google, and finding myself in my dream job doing programming language stuff full-time.
Life is weird, man.
Also, Vidalias (and, really, all of the alliums) are wonderful.
So here I was "in the game industry" and spending zero time actually making games. I posted a rant complaining about that.
Some random redditor said, basically, "I work at Google. If you're a decent C++ programmer, I'll put in a referral for you."
Meanwhile, my wife and I had taken a trip to the Pacific Northwest and decided we wanted to move to that area. I started looking for jobs at other game companies in Seattle. I flew out there to interview at ArenaNet. Since I had a referral, a Google recruiter expedited an interview at the Seattle office while I was in town. I wasn't very seriously considering Google, but I wasn't about to say no.
I bombed the ArenaNet interview. (I think the main sticking point was a question around the time complexity of adding an element to a growable array. I said it was constant, but couldn't effectively explained amortized complexity to them and they didn't seem to understand that amortized complexity existed at all.)
Wonder of wonders, I just squeaked through the Google one.
I ended up on a random project doing front-end programming in JavaScript because I had UI experience. I didn't care for the product and programming UI in JS is, uh, not my idea of a good time, so it wasn't super fun.
However, I randomly took a one-day improve class that Google offerred. There, I met another Googler on another project and we started talking about language nerd stuff. He later ended up forming a team to work on Traceur, which was a project to prototype language changes to JS. They were ramping up, and he remembered I was into language things, so I asked me to join.
That project wound down later so I went looking for other projects to join. Dart was ramping up then and went there. It's been a blast.
But, literally, if I hadn't posted a comment on reddit and taken this improv class, my whole career might be different. I might have left Google to rejoin the game industry or something else entirely.
My first job out of college happened because I met and befriended one specific person in college (was there for 5 years).
My second job (and first startup) happened because I went to a 4-person dinner/game-night at a friend's (who I met at that first job) house, and talked to one of the other attendees who was interviewing at this company, and was willing to refer me (was barely there for a year and a half, but it fundamentally changed my view of work and employment).
Fast forward, and my current job (nearly 8 years now) happened because I checked an email account that I hadn't looked at in several years (and saw a recruiting email of a type I'd usually ignore), because I was trying to sign into some random account on the internet and I'd used that email address as the recovery account, many years before.
Obviously there was more to it than those single events, but each of those things were essential in opening up the opportunity in the first place.
My personal life and social circles often grew from similar simple, one-off, surprise events.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39835357-no-waste-kitche...
It's weird to think about being on this side of a potential life changing choice, but it's really not nearly as big of a deal to me (I'm keeping my fully remote-friendly job) as some people seem to think it is!
I really hope more people do it more often! It's a very effective and wholesome way to foster understanding and spreading of good ideas, and dampening the damning effects of a lot of tribalism in today's political climate.
Also - predators. You can buy ladybugs in most garden centers for almost nothing, and they eat aphids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Literally.
They still do, depending on where you live. My daughter brought home a sunflower seed from a field trip last spring. By the end of summer we had a 7ft tall sunflower growing next to our deck. This year we have several more already sprouting in that area.
It also had a side effect of really enhancing the plot of pretty terrible clay soil we plucked it in. Lots of herbs we attempted (and failed) to grow last year are already starting to flourish this year in that spot.
It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.
It seems there's a lot of interest in gardening / food production among tech people. For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it's totally different from working inside with machines, but there are important and unexpected overlaps. For example if you have a solid understanding of the OSI model which informs your method of system design, you can easily move into gardening where knowledge of the layers of a forest plays a similar role. Having this experience in tech makes it easy to zero in on similar structural principles in gardening, learn about them, and apply that knowledge whereas many others clearly don't.
Just like a person who doesn't understand the value of a proper foundation in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won't first seek to build strong healthy soil, and they will constantly fight against nature rather than work with it, doing more work while getting fewer results.
As an aside, regarding onions: last year I cut off some green onion bottoms from the store and put them in the ground (including the little roots). They grew back and gave several more green onion harvests before winter set in, and now they're back on their own! Permanent green onion. You can do this with a number of plants, btw. Try it!