On a rainy Tuesday morning in 2026, as Rahul was heading out for the most important job interview of his life, he could not have imagined that in just a few minutes, his entire life was about to change. He had worn his only valuable blue shirt for the interview at the country's largest multinational company. While walking down the street, he stepped into a small café by the roadside for a last look at his notes and ordered a cup of coffee.
Just then, a small cat rushed in through the open door of the café and startled him, causing a metal spoon to fall from the waiter’s hand onto the floor. The loud noise made a man sitting at the adjacent table suddenly jump, and in his clumsiness, he accidentally knocked over Rahul's coffee cup, spilling it directly onto the middle of his blue shirt. The dark coffee stain spread on the shirt in such a way that, with only 20 minutes left until the interview, it was impossible for Rahul to go to the interview board. In intense despair, anger, and blaming fate, Rahul decided not to attend the interview and sat down on a bench in a nearby park, thinking that a trivial cat and a cup of coffee had destroyed his entire career.
As he was lamenting his fate while sitting in the park, some important papers held by an elderly gentleman sitting next to him flew away in the wind. Out of politeness, Rahul ran to pick up the papers, and noticed a business model for a new start-up company written on them. As a student of economics, he couldn't contain his curiosity and told the gentleman that changing the marketing strategy a bit could cut the business costs in half. The elderly gentleman, who was primarily a retired businessman looking for good ideas to fund new young entrepreneurs, was impressed by Rahul's sharp intellect. They spoke for nearly two hours on the park bench, and the gentleman proposed that instead of chasing a job at someone else's company, they should start a new consultancy firm combining his capital with Rahul's ideas.
In the next five years, Rahul's start-up company became one of the most successful businesses in the country, creating jobs for hundreds of youth. One day, while sitting in his large office drinking coffee, Rahul suddenly remembered that Tuesday from five years ago. He calculated that if that cat hadn't entered the café that day, the spoon would not have fallen from the waiter's hand, the sound wouldn't have startled the man at the adjacent table, coffee wouldn't have spilled on his shirt, and he would have gone to the interview, possibly spending his entire life as an ordinary employee. He would never have gone to that park, never met that businessman, and today he might not have become a successful entrepreneur. A small incident involving a cat for just a few seconds had changed Rahul's entire life, and this is the butterfly effect, where a minuscule event at one end of nature leads to a massive change at the other end.
