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LM: #352: Extraordinary luck is ordinary
It takes luck to make it as a creative, but not as much luck as it seems.
I think it can be explained by what I call the “Travis in Tokyo” effect. At some point, you may have been traveling, and run into a friend. It’s a shocking experience, and you say, “What are the odds I’d run into my friend Travis in Tokyo?!”
There are a few phenomena that make this less exceptional than it seems.
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One is ad-hoc analysis. You didn’t form a hypothesis before going to Tokyo whether you’d run into Travis. A lot of other surprising things could have happened. Scientists run into problems when they look for patterns in large data sets, finding surprising things such as that as cottage cheese sales decline, so do babies named Andrea.
Another is the multiple comparisons problem, which is that when a lot of different things have low odds of happening, at least one of them is likely to happen. You were surprised to run into Travis in Tokyo, but didn’t reflect on the odds you’d run into at least one of the hundreds of people you know.
Finally, there’s the fact that you’re friends with Travis and everyone else because you have things in common – perhaps an interest in Japan or travel, or just that you’re in the socioeconomic profile of people who would travel to Japan.
When we look at the success of a creator, and the chain of events that led to that success, we get tunnel vision as we consider the outrageously-low odds that chain of events could have occurred.
But we don’t consider that out of the many things they tried, this was the one that worked; that when adding up the low probabilities of their many attempts, the probabilities weren’t as low as they seemed; and that as skill and network effects compounded, those odds climbed with each attempt.
There is hope.
Aphorism: “Every artist should be content to do willingly those things towards which he feels a natural inclination.” —Giorgio Vasari
Cool: The HATOKU Stylus Pen (Amazon) is a $20 good-enough alternative to Apple Pencil, for compatible iPads.
Best,
David
P.S. If you work with the odds, you can have success that seems against the odds, which makes it easier to Finish What Matters – the title of my upcoming book. Read it many months before others in the Preview Edition.
