Four musket balls tore through George Washington's coat at the Battle of Monongahela. Two horses were shot dead beneath him. He rode back and forth across the worst of the fighting rallying broken men, and when the smoke cleared he did not have a single scratch on him. An Indian chief later said he ordered his men to fire at Washington again and again, then stopped, certain the Great Spirit was shielding him. He was 23 years old. He wrote to his brother a few days later, almost puzzled by it, and said he had been protected beyond all human expectation by the miraculous care of Providence. And here is the part people forget. That was not the one time. That was the pattern. At Princeton he rode his horse to within thirty yards of the British line and told his men to hold as the muskets opened up. An officer who was there covered his eyes because he was sure he was about to watch the general die. When he looked again Washington was still sitting tall in the saddle, waving his hat, completely unharmed. For eight years of war he stood where the fighting was heaviest and the bullets simply refused to find him. His enemies started to talk about it. His own soldiers started to believe it. He was not being reckless. He just never seemed to believe it was his time. This is the thread that runs through nearly every great man in history. They lived like the date had already been written and no enemy on earth could move it up by a single hour. Caesar stood on the bank of the Rubicon, looked at everything he was about to risk, and said the die is already cast. Then he walked into it. Cromwell rode into battle after battle convinced the outcome had been settled long before either army woke up that morning, and he fought like a man who had nothing left to fear because the ending was not his to decide. Andrew Jackson stood on the Capitol steps while a man walked up and pulled a pistol on him at point blank range. It misfired. The man drew a second pistol. That one misfired too. The odds of both failing were so small that people argued about it for years. Jackson just raised his cane and went after the man himself. Stonewall Jackson would ride calmly through a storm of gunfire while everyone around him flinched, and when someone finally asked how he stayed so steady he said it plainly. My religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has already fixed the time of my death, so I do not trouble myself about it. I am always ready, no matter when it comes. That was the whole secret. Not that they loved danger. Not that they did not feel fear. They simply believed their steps were already numbered by a hand higher than any king, and a man who truly believes that walks through fire like it is a hallway. You cannot kill a man before his work is done. And when you line their lives up side by side, the escapes, the misfires, the bullets that passed through the coat but never the man, it gets very hard to call all of it luck.