I’m back up in this bitch with some veracity you can start implementing today.

Have you ever heard the adage, “What do Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, and Walt Disney have in common?” The answer is, of course, “They were all failures at some point.”

We live in a world of probabilities. Before you apply for a job, ask a girl back to your place, try and break a weightlifting record, or whatever else, you have a certain probability of success. A lot of the time, the chances of success for a given activity are a lot less than we would like. Depending upon where you are, you could have a 1% chance of meeting a girl who is DTF with little investment, and a 0.0001% chance of meeting a girl worth the investment. Of course, it is impossible to know exactly what your odds are at any given time (I just made up the percentages above), but recognizing these actions as having a probabilistic outcome can help us cater our strategy towards meeting our goals.

Everyone knows that a perfectly symmetrical coin has a 50%/50% chance of landing with either side facing upwards (heads or tails). We also know that if we take a coin and flip it, say, 10 times, we are unlikely to get an equal heads/tails 50%/50% split. If we flip the same coin 100 times, we will almost certainly see that, while still not a perfect 50%/50% split, the split is a lot more even than when we flipped only 10 times. If we flip the coin 1,000, times, 10,000 times, etc., we will consistently see a closer and closer split the more times we flip the coin.

This is known as the law of large numbers. Put plainly, in any probabilistic situation, the more times the situation is played out, the closer our actual observed statistics will be to the initial probability. It is somewhat interesting in its own right, but it has a particularly powerful corollary.

Given that there is certain probability (of any likelihood) that a situation will play out a certain way, it becomes increasingly likely that one iteration of events will play out that way. Put another way, if there is a 1% chance that a girl will let you skeet on her face, given enough girls you ask (~100) one of them will almost certainly allow it. How does this help us? Understanding this mathematical fact allows us several things.

  1. We take some failure as a given already, allowing us to rightly dismiss failure as inevitable and not shameful. Be shameless.

  2. We understand that the more times we attempt any given thing, the more likely it is that we will be successful at that thing.

  3. We understand that when we improve ourselves by going to the gym, dressing better, attaining more social status, we are merely improving the probability we have of success. This is why, ultimately, the most successfully people never stop taking risks, never stop looking for new opportunities, and aren’t afraid to barrel through the failures that will inevitably come before success. Every time you increase your value, you’re increasing your probabilities of success. You improve 0.1% at a time, which is why it can take so long to see the fruits of your labor. Keep at it, and you’ll get there. It’s not feel good bull shit. It’s math.

TL;DR: Every activity has a certain probability of working out a certain way. In order to have situations turn out the way that you want, increase the probability of positive outcome through self-improvement, and increase your overall chances of having positive outcomes by increasing the number of activates you engage in and the frequency you engage in them. Because math.