Playing the odds

2021-04-19

I was going to lead off with some pithy quote about how life is a game, but they seem a bit ... overaggressive. "PLAY IT." "MONEY IS HOW WE KEEP SCORE." (oof, seriously?) "WHERE EITHER YOU LOSE OR YOU LEARN." "WITH MANY RULES AND NO REFEREE."

OK, so never mind that. But, I have a brief but important point to make about "playing the game of life." I'll lead up to it by saying that it's fine to want to "win" at life, by which I mean to be successful, by whatever measure you choose. I have my own measure - hint hint, it's not just money - but this should work out regardless of your ethos.

Many people seek the surefire formula for success in life, through financial planning wizards or professional pop philosophers or by emulating high-tech visionaries or athletes or celebrities. Do what they say and do, and success will come, just like it has for them. And I'm not going to say that all their ideas are bunk. Far from it, I think you should take in whatever wisdom you can find there.

But the sad truth is that much of your life is not in your control. We're way more subject to outside forces, and to sheer luck, than we'd like to think. When Barack Obama said, "You didn't build that," he was referring to the environment around you that could lead to your success. Not only did you not create any of that environment, you might also have been lucky to be born within that environment in the first place. (Immigrants, welcome!) Basically, the "self-made man" is very much a myth, which of course displeases those men who consider themselves self-made.

And that environment can sour on you too. Say, by throwing a global pandemic at you. How many carefully curated paths to success were utterly ruined by that one?

So, how then to succeed at a game where you have only limited control of the outcome? The answer is to make moves that increase the odds of your success.

This is a highly strategic approach to success, as opposed to a tactical ten-step plan to financial freedom and independence. Each move you make, each step, may or may not ultimately help you along, because you can't fully control the consequences. However, any move can open up the chance for positive things to happen, for opportunities to become available to you. That way, when the environment somehow, inevitably, reveals a significant step towards success, you are positioned to take advantage of it.

For example: Why go to college? The dogma is that a college degree ensures you'll have a good career, and not having one relegates you to menial labor for life. This isn't true, of course: there are plenty of successful people with no college degree, and plenty of "failures" with one or more degrees. Still, the reason why it's a good idea is that a degree makes it more likely for paths to success to open up. Or, it doesn't because your success destinations don't lie along any of those paths, so you engage in some other effort instead ... one that opens up different paths. No matter what, it's never that the moves guarantee success, but they make success more probable.

Even a small step can have a large consequence, like the butterfly effect. On a whim, you went to that job fair, and how amazingly lucky that you had that one conversation, out of nowhere, that landed you an awesome job. There is no way you could have planned for that conversation to occur, but by just going to the fair, you bumped up the odds just enough for yourself. Once in a while, even a long shot pays out.

A word about risk-taking, speaking of long shots: The idea here is to position yourself to go for high-risk, high-reward bets, but not to only go for those. Mark Zuckerberg didn't need his college degree to become richer than God, but that doesn't mean you or anyone else can; he just happened to take a huge risk that paid off. (There's a survivorship bias here too - you don't hear from those who did what Mark Z did and failed miserably. There are more of them than him, because of the odds.) Instead, you should focus mostly of moves that reliably increase your success probability. This is a springboard that you can use then to go for the really crazy things, knowing that if those moves fail, you can bounce back.

That's the truth of it, that not every move pans out. (Most don't.) This means that there is not one single perfect path to success, and the strategy of playing the odds embraces that. The upshot is that you don't fully control your progress through the game, but that control was an illusion anyway. It's OK, though, because as long as you keep making moves that improve the odds of "success", as you define it, then no matter where you do wind up at the end of the game, you'll be satisfied.

> "Luck is the residue of design." -- Branch Rickey