Maximise Your Fails
March 22, 2021โข207 words
Reading time: 1-2 min
In your process of maximising your luck, by increasing the number of opportunities you take, you will inevitably increase the number of times you fail.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Thomas J Watson, the founder of IBM (the company behind the AI 'Watson'*, which managed to destroy human competitors in Jeopardy! and can provide individualized suggestions for patients to healthcare professionals, as well as Micromedex, my favourite medicines database (not sponsored) noted that the formula of success is to simply "[d]ouble your rate of failure."
The logic behind that is that by increasing the number of fails you encounter, the number of opportunities you took must have increased, thereby increasing the number of chances for success.
If you ever doubt whether an opportunity is worth taking, the chance of success is arguably irrelevant. We cannot know that until our future selves have experienced it. Instead, the consideration would be your opportunity cost- how much time and otherwise resources you have to expend for the opportunity, and what else you could have done with it.
Instead, what you can do for your future self, is just to try. For those who try get rewarded.