Success is a Numbers Game — Here’s How to Stack the Odds in Your Favor
Life is a game of probabilities, and you can directly — and indirectly — control the outcome
“Your success is the combination of an unaccountably large number of factors, moments and decisions.”
-The Unfair Advantage, by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba
Our lives are swimming in infinite potential, and how you navigate the possibilities that are open to you directly determines the course of your one and only life.
During the course of the average day, we each think between 30,000–60,000 independent thoughts! We also face a dizzying array of options and choices — everything from which shoe to put on first, to whether or not today’s the day we turn right around at our office door and vow never to return.
We could pull an Anna Karenina and throw ourselves in front of a train (note to self: don’t do that!); or we could walk across town to a store we’ve never been to and give $20 to the first 5 people we meet on the way there. I’ve done something like this, except with $50 bills to homeless people.
The number of choices available to us is literally astounding, but if it’s personal success that we’re after, we need to be extremely intentional about the kinds of actions we take, the thoughts we think, and the situations we place ourselves in.
I mean, there are billions of other people in the world, and almost any single one of them could help us or hurt us in some way. What’s more, what we choose today directly affects the scope of possibilities available to us tomorrow.
What we do now echoes in eternity.
We’re right in the middle of this infinite, awe-inspiring universe, and right here in this moment, we have a terrific amount of agency over our lives and how they turn out. We can affect things, just by directing our thoughts and actions, and this is a power that is absolutely critical to tap into.
Your future literally hangs in the balance.
So, how do we go about navigating chance and possibility? How do expand the choices and options we have in our own lives? It’s to the power of agency that I now turn…
The Power of Agency
By definition, I can’t get into ALL the ways in which you are free. There are simply too many of them. You’re so free! Damn, man! You’re so free, and you could be so happy — if you were only to realize how free you are, and how in control you are.
Simply recognize how much agency and control you have over your one and only life!
It literally hurts my limbs and neurons and organs thinking about how free I am, and how awesome that is. But alright, enough about me. Let’s talk about you.
First, you need to recognize that although the world is random and chaotic, you do have agency, and you have a significant say in how your one and only life turns out.
Next, realize the necessity, the absolute imperative of controlling the controllable, and forgetting about the rest.
What you can’t directly control need not concern you — at least, not when you’re deciding what to do. We have far more control over events (and obviously, your own thoughts and actions) than we sometimes realize, and that’s where you need to start. Indeed, where else could you start?
It’s like the present moment: where else are you going to BE?!?
Going from 0%-99%
Life is a series of probabilities, and what you choose to do with your thoughts, words, and actions influence those probabilities. Nothing worth doing has a 100% chance of succeeding, but, as I said, you have a significant say in how your own life turns out.
You can press your thumb on the scale of probabilities and give yourself more chances to win.
You can think of it like this:
If you do nothing, then you have precisely a 0% chance of succeeding or achieving that big, far-off goal that you’re thinking about right now. Do nothing, and you fail. I think that’s pretty obvious.
But if, say, you’re trying to become influential on Instagram, posting something gives you at least a non-zero chance of achieving that goal, whereas just liking other people’s posts isn’t going to do anything for you.
I’m just using IG as an example, but this applies to literally everything.
So you’ve decided that you’re going to make an actual post on Instagram and start with that. So you post a picture of your bookcase with a short, witty caption, maybe a few hashtags (because someone told you those help with increasing your reach), and you wait for the internet fame to roll in.
But you haven’t really done much of anything yet. You’ve just made yet another post on IG that’s going to get lost among the millions of other posts made by people far more famous than you are today.
That by itself isn’t going to get you to your goal, so you decide to do more.
The big win here, before we go further, is that you’ve actually started — your chances of success are no longer zero.
From here on out, every additional action you take is increasing the probability that you’ll be successful.
This isn’t a “how to succeed on Instagram” post or anything, but posting high-quality images with insightful captions (plus maybe a reel or two) is going to significantly improve the odds that people will start paying attention to your little #Bookstagram page. That’s something.
Maybe that brings you up to a 25% chance that you’ll have 50,000 followers before the end of the year. What else can you do?
Well, you can start collaborating with other creators and gaining access to their audiences — you can create awesome stuff and get other people to share it. That’s going to help a ton. Maybe that increases your chances of success to 40%.
I won’t go on and on, but you see what I’m driving at!
Every new, additional action you take increases the chances of you being successful.
You can’t get in shape if you don’t go to the gym (0% chance), but committing to a training program, eating healthy most of the time, getting 8 hours of sleep per night, and hiring a personal trainer can add a ton of percentage points to the probability of your eventual success.
You control many of these actions. They are things you can do, such that by doing them, you are more likely to be successful.
If you do enough — if you take enough action — you’ll be in a position where it is now unreasonable to assume that if you keep going, you won’t be successful.
I had to read that again when I first heard someone put it like that.
But every time I think about it, it just gains in profundity and power: Take so much action, and for so long a time period, that it will then be UNREASONABLE TO ASSUME that you WON’T succeed.
You’ll be working so hard, and on exactly the right things, that no one in their right mind would dare bet against you. And that, my friend, is a powerful place to be.
All the best,
Matt Karamazov