I’m thrilled to announce that my friend and the enormously creative Rachel Sussman will be appearing at TEDGlobal this July. Rachel, for the past five years, has been working on a project, The Oldest Living Things in the World.

When I heard her news, I realized that we can never be ready. I immediately thought of Frank Wilczek, the theoretical physicist. When he received word that he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction, he was in the shower. His wife had to call him out, so he was dripping wet and, of course, naked. He took the long call this way (apparently there are lots of instructions for receiving a Nobel Prize).

When we hear news — of speaking at TED, of friends coming into town, of receiving the Nobel Prize, good news, bad news, small and large — we can never prepare. Or as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” But it’s in the grace of how we handle it that who we are comes through. As of today, the project has five days to go on Kickstarter, where you can learn more about the project, or see her today in the Wall Street Journal.