Last Card
NO SKELETON KEY
If there’s one thing that never gets old, it’s novelty.
So, as a final call for Youniversity, I figured we’d do something special. What if I told you that you could do something right now for the very first time?
That might not sound like such a big deal, necessarily—although the older we get, the bigger deal it becomes— but no, that’s not quite what I mean either.
Not merely something you could do for the first time, but something that, in all likelihood, has never been done before. By anybody. Ever.
No joke.
Okay. Go and get yourself a deck of cards.
Shuffle them.
Shuffle them good.
Ready?
With all the weight of expectation, I didn’t want you to choke, so the good news is, you’ve already done it. You’ve shuffled a deck of cards into an arrangement that has almost certainly never been done before.
Not once in the entire history of human beings shuffling decks of cards.
Not in all recorded time. And so, on this fine day, you join some esteemed company— those who clawed humanity forward at the very frontiers of human advancement: Shackleton, Hilary, Armstrong, and now you.
This is the power of factorials — the mathematical symbol for which, quite appropriately, is an exclamation mark. Because these are numbers that get eyebrow-raising very fast.
Only to just as quickly get eyebrow-lowering. Because when we start to venture beyond the millions, we humans have trouble putting these numbers into any sort of perspective.
For example, if one million seconds past was about eleven days ago— back on about 2nd June— take a stab at how long ago 1 billion seconds was…
31.7 years. Were you close?
And that’s still a rounding error compared to the territory we’re in here. And that matters because it isn’t merely numbers we misjudge.
It’s complexity.
It’s probability.
It’s reality itself.
A deck of 52 cards can be arranged in 8 x 10⁶⁷ possible configurations. A number so astronomically large it is essentially meaningless without illustration. So I'll leave you with Matias Frank Jenson on Wait But Why (abridged below) to give you a far better idea. Hang on.
Actually, it’s probably better if you sit down. And hang on.
Imagine that you could shuffle a deck of cards every single second, day and night, for eternity.
After every billion years, you remove one grain of sand from the earth.
Every time you have removed every single grain of sand on earth, you earn a penny! (and the sand is replenished)
For a billion dollars, you can buy a single sheet of paper.
As the aeons pass, you start to build a tower of your paper sheets, stacking them on top of each other.
After quite some time, your paper tower has reached the sun!
When you have built 1.7 million towers. Each reaching the sun. Built from stacking sheets of paper you purchased for a billion dollars each. From the pennies you earned for emptying the world of sand—by removing one grain of sand every billion years.
You will have reached the number.
And with that tenuous grip on the combinatorial possibilities that a mere 52 variables offer up, I’d like you to consider something else.
You.
Because the outcome of your shuffle wasn’t random. Well — it was, but only in the sense that weather is random, or history is random. It emerged from a specific arrangement of forces— a specific person, in a specific place, at a specific time.
Had you stopped half a second earlier, been interrupted by a text message, sneezed midway through, or shuffled one extra time for luck, you'd be looking at a different outcome.
And where a deck contains a mere 52 variables, your every breath involves many, many more. Sleep quality. Stress load. Age. Hormonal profile. Training. Medication. Genetics. Workload. Circadian rhythm. Recovery. Social support. Injury history. Habits. Beliefs.
Consider all the strange and wonderful combinations therein. And that’s not exhaustive; it’s barely a start. I haven’t even mentioned food, but there are 108 known contributing factors to fat loss alone.
We readily accept that no two fingerprints are alike. No two faces. No two lives, but our health and fitness frustrations are precisely because we believe they want only for another program.
Another diet. Another routine. Another method.
Another time. And another time. And another time.
Frustrations inevitable when you have the power of these numbers working against you.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether you’re seeking these answers from an influencer on the gram or the Large Hadron Collider; the maths tells us the chances somebody has somehow accounted for your full factorial complexity are so vanishingly unlikely we can feel extremely confident in saying they are zero.
Which, interestingly, means that for all our endless individual complexity—our irreducible particularity— the solution is never universal.
The mistake always is.
Because there is no skeleton key.
But if you think this makes your chances of finding the answer equally unlikely, thankfully, this is not so. You can decode these variables in your life - in the same way that not 5 minutes ago you trailblazed humanity into the great unknown— because you are the shuffler.
Complexity does not mean confusion. It does not mean paralysis. Only that the solution is simply specific.
And specifically simple.
You’d never manage all variables equally— even if you could— and so the skill is not optimisation, but discrimination. The Theory of Constraints tells us that every system has a bottleneck, so we address this limiting factor. And keep doing so— identifying the points of highest leverage—the needle movers.
The question is never what works. The question is what works for you. Now. Given this history, this body, this life.
Not built around the fantasy that your life will finally calm down, but the reality that it probably won’t.
Iteration over prescription, self-generated feedback over ideology, embodied learning over abstract advice.
A system built around universal human physiology — organism-centric, species-specific, starting upstream and working down — can accommodate the full complexity of any individual. It does not hand you an answer. It generates your answer. From wherever you are.
And so that’s where we start.
If you want to know what that looks like in practice — that is Youniversity.
Not instruction, not motivation, not information, but calibration. A structured environment for learning to read your own tea leaves. For identifying your bottleneck. For understanding which variables are most in play, which to address first, and in what order.
Not because people are special, but because people are different.
And because reality is specific. And fluid.
The sequence is always the same. The answer never is.
You can let the cards fall where they may.
Or you can shuffle up and deal.
Leftfield Youniversity begins Friday. Applications close Monday, June 14th,
Enjoy your weekend
- OLI