A draw dressed as a verdict

A weekend bazaar in Sheikh Zayed has forty stalls and, every season, several hundred makers who would like one.

The organisers sift the applications. Some are easy to turn down: a blurry photo, a product already on three other tables. But after the first cut there are perhaps two hundred makers whose bags, jams, lamps and children's clothes would sit perfectly well in the hall. Any of them would do. There are still only forty stalls.

What happens next is called choosing, but much of it is chance. Which application was opened first, which photo caught a tired eye late at night, who reminded the organiser of a stall that sold out last year. Change the evening and you change the forty.

The makers who are turned away hear none of this. They get a polite line and a blank where a reason should be, and so they fill the blank themselves. The prices must be wrong. The brand must look amateur. Perhaps the whole idea was silly.

It would be kinder, and more accurate, to tell them the truth: you made the final group, and then the draw went the other way.

Most of us resist explaining anything by luck. Good fortune feels like something we did not earn, and misfortune feels like an excuse. So we credit ourselves with every win and punish ourselves for every miss, and both accounts are partly fiction.

Naming luck is not surrender. A maker who knows she was good enough and unlucky can spend the next month making the product better. A maker who believes she was judged and found wanting will spend it repairing something that was never broken.