Chance & Choice Lab
I have long been fascinated by the way life presents us with unexpected opportunities, and how those moments only matter if we are brave enough to act on them.
It is not chance alone that shapes a person’s story, but the choices we make when it matters. Looking back, every meaningful turning point in my life started with something unforeseen: a conversation I could have ignored, an invitation I could have declined, a risk I could have avoided. What made the difference was choosing to say yes to the right opportunities.
Over time, I became obsessed with this powerful interplay between chance and choice, and how it quietly determines the direction of our careers, relationships, and sense of purpose.
This curiosity soon grew beyond my own story. In between academic deadlines and creative projects, I kept hearing people ask the same questions: Why do people make the choices they make? Why do we follow certain career paths? Are we genuinely playing to our strengths, or simply doing what feels safe and obvious? How often do we pause long enough to ask whether this is the life we truly wanted?
The Chance & Choice Lab was born from these reflections. It is not a traditional lab with microscopes and white coats. It is a living, human-centered, experimental space to explore how people discover their capabilities and make life-shaping decisions.
It started quietly. I created a handful of capability assessment tools and shared them with students, colleagues, and friends.
What followed were countless honest conversations over coffee, or in classrooms, or at kitchen tables, on long walks. In these conversations, people admitted they had no clear idea what they were truly good at. Some confessed they were unsure if they were even in the right job, or how they had ended up in a life that felt designed by someone else.
What became obvious was this: people are not short on talents and skills; they are short on the right tools and reflective spaces to recognise them. That is what The Chance & Choice Lab set out to offer.
What began as a personal curiosity has evolved into a growing library of decision-making tools, capability frameworks, reflective exercises, and – most importantly – real stories.
People began sharing how a single, unexpected decision shaped an entire chapter of their life, and how these frameworks gave them a way to notice opportunities they might otherwise have missed. The lab became a space where insights from research are shaped by real human stories.
I owe much of this to those around me. Friends, students, and mentors encouraged me to lean into this work long before I fully recognised its value. They understood something important: recognising one’s own strengths, and having clear guidance when making life’s biggest decisions, is one of the most meaningful gifts we can offer others. They were right.
Today, Chance & Choice Lab lives online as a growing digital community for reflective, curious people asking important questions about their lives. Through videos, capability finder tools, decision frameworks, and open conversations, the Lab invites anyone standing at a crossroads – deciding about a university course, undertaking or changing careers, navigating a midlife shift – to pause, take stock, and choose with intention.
At its core, the Lab helps people identify their dominant capabilities. Not just the talents they were born with, but the skills they have honed through experience. When you know what you are genuinely good at, you stop chasing every opportunity and start recognising the right ones.
The Chance & Choice Lab is perhaps the most rewarding human project of my career, a reminder that the most valuable thing we ever collect is the story we tell about our own lives – and we always have the power to reshape it.
