The X=Y Diagonal
Plot your life as the wobbling line between what you plan and what fortune throws back.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Derren Brown revives an ancient image: a graph where the x axis is your aims and plans, and the y axis is fortune — everything life throws at you that you did not choose. The life you actually lead is the undulating x=y diagonal between them, sometimes pulled by your plans, sometimes yanked by circumstance. Modern optimism culture, which he traces to a Protestant work-ethic hangover, insists you can crank that line up until it matches your goals purely by believing in yourself. That erases fortune from the picture entirely, which is why we stopped calling people unfortunate and started calling them losers. Reach for this model whenever a setback is being read as a personal failing.
Origin
Brown describes it as an ancient image that has appeared in many forms across philosophy, which he uses to explain why the American optimistic model of self-belief misreads how a life actually unfolds.
Core principles
- 01Your plans occupy only one of the two axes that determine your life.
- 02Fortune is a real force, not a residue left over from insufficient belief.
- 03The illusion that your plans control outcomes is what propels you through the first half of life.
- 04A culture that deletes fortune converts bad luck into personal shame.
- 05Respecting fortune is not fatalism — it is accurate accounting.
How to run it
- 1
Draw the two axes honestly
Take a situation you are struggling with and split it onto two axes: on the x axis, your aims, plans and intentions; on the y axis, the fortune component — the illness, the timing, the market, the other person's choices. Write both out rather than assuming everything belongs to the first axis.
Pro tip Do this on paper for a specific setback, not for your life in the abstract. The vagueness is what lets you re-absorb all the blame.
- 2
Name what fortune actually contributed
Explicitly say what part of the outcome was thrown at you rather than chosen by you. Brown's point is that we have culturally obliterated this category, so the naming has to be deliberate to happen at all.
Watch out Do not use this as a blanket excuse. The model only works if you are equally honest about the x axis — what you genuinely did or failed to do.
- 3
Stop trying to crank the line
Abandon the project of forcing the diagonal up into line with your goals through sheer self-belief. Accept that the line will undulate, and that periods where fortune dominates are structural, not evidence of weak faith or weak effort.
- 4
Redirect your effort to the axis you own
Having separated the two, put your emotional and practical energy into your own thoughts and actions — the only place effort compounds — and let the fortune axis be what it is.
Pro tip Brown pairs this directly with Stoicism, which he calls a very good toolkit for navigating the diagonal.
In the wild
Brown points to a change in ordinary English usage as evidence the model has been lost. Where a culture that understood fortune would call someone who had been dealt a bad hand unfortunate, the contemporary optimism culture calls them a loser — recategorising the y axis as a defect on the x axis.
→ The language shift shows how completely fortune has been written out, and why so many people privately experience ordinary bad luck as proof of personal inadequacy.
Brown observes that as you get older you realise your plans probably had nothing to do with how things actually turned out — but that the illusion they did is exactly what carried you through the first half of life.
→ He treats the illusion as useful early fuel rather than a lie to be destroyed, which is why he recommends checking its limits rather than abandoning ambition.
Common mistakes
Treating self-belief as an outcome lever
Believing hard enough does not move the y axis. When the outcome does not arrive, the only available explanation left inside that system is that you did not believe enough — a perfect cycle of blame that exonerates the philosophy and indicts you.
Using fortune to explain away everything
The mirror-image error is dumping your own inaction onto the fortune axis. The model is a separation tool, not a permission slip; misapplied it removes the one axis you can actually work on.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone whose self-worth is currently pegged to an outcome that circumstance is dominating — founders in a bad market, people recovering from illness or redundancy.
Not ideal for
Someone using bad luck as a standing alibi, or in the early ambitious phase where the optimistic illusion is doing productive work.
From the transcript
“the y axis, is just life, what they used to call fortune. It's all the stuff that just gets thrown at you.”
“We've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune and life from that. You know, we used to we used to call people um unfortunate. Now…”
From the episode
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Derren Brown