Step 32 - Slot Machine Probability & Chasing The Mirage
This depressing, yet pragmatic lesson explains how life seems to deliver results and how countless people die while chasing a non-existent mirage. How doing everything right, might still not give the results we long.
We grew up in an environment, where when we did something good, mommy would come and reward us. But life is not that way.
Even if we do everything right. When we work hard and put in the hours. Even if we are smart and are reading a lot of books. Even if we are humble and adaptive. Yet, life still doesn't give us the outcome we want. But why?
Because we live in a world of uncertainty.
There is no black or white. Convictions that were believed to be true 100 hundred years ago, are ridiculed today. And in the same way our convictions today might proof wrong in the future. It seems like we will never know for sure, how life truly works. What does it have to do with the reason we don't get the good life?
Having strong convictions about which business partner to choose, which product to launch, which partner to marry, to stay at the job or to built a business is like chasing a mirage.
A mirage is an imaginary place which we will never find. And the desert is full with the bones of people who have chased the mirage.
And in a similar way our convictions of what is right and wrong might lead us to get lost in time, miss the good life and die miserably.
Thus dropping those convictions, we are left with uncertainty and we got to be willing to accept uncertainty, because the only way to know for sure, which choices are the correct ones, is to built an alternate universe and to observe the outcomes of our decisions, which apparently can't be done by you an me.
Is there a certain way to get the good life? Unfortunately not.
But still there is a chance, and we get the best chance through moving towards the slot-machine probability.
Imagine two slot-machines. Machine A gives you a 1/10 chance of winning, while Machine B gives you a 1/20 chance of winning.
Sometimes Machine A is not going to give any results even though the chance is 1/10, and successively players will lose at Machine A. While sometimes when we use Machine B we win, even though the chance is 1/20. And that is how life seems to work.
Sometimes we can do all the right things and it still won't work out. And sometimes we get a little bit lucky, we did the wrong thing and we won. And then we get confused, because people are pointing at Machine B and sooner or later we are sitting at the 1/20 Machine. But this mentality is incorrect, because it is still better, even when we are losing, to sit at the 1/10 strategy.
In life we also got to choose. In health, wealth, love and happiness. We have to choose between business partners, between products to launch, between women. And we feel paralyzed, because we are looking at the needle in the height stack, to understand which is right and which is wrong. And we will never find it, because we live in a world of uncertainty and we can't bring certainty to all the things we wish we could.
But one choice is going to be Probability A and one is going to be Probability B. Therefore we should go down the path that wins 1/10 and not the path that wins 1/20, even though the 1/20 wins some of the time.
With which woman should we continue a relationship? Sometimes we just choose one and wish that things will work out, but we have to go with the numbers, if we don't want to chase a mirage.
Because a mirage is a dangerous game. People are chasing the mirage and think, that maybe there is a sea of water, if I follow what I see. But quite contrary this train of thought has low odds. The better odds are staked to the people who use a plastic stredge to collect the morning dew until they are rescued. The better odds might be not as cool, but it is slow and steady to get enough water to survive.
This way of thinking is harder.
And further accepting uncertainty and probability presupposes a scary conclusion. That we can do the right thing all our life and still not get what we want. And this is hard to cope with, because we are wired to think in anthropomorphic understandings of cause and effect, of black and white. That our mommy will reward us, if we do our best.
But even though we do our best, the world might still not acknowledge our efforts.
The way life seems to work, is that we need to know stuff. Therefore a good strategy to increase our probability of success is increasing our skills.
Increasing skills is a good slot-machine. Doing that long enough and eventually somebody is probably find out what we did. But it won't happen over night and it might not happen ever.
That's why we love get-rich-quick-schemes, because here we have cause and effect. We put a quarter in the slot-machine, we pull it, every time we win. But in reality we won't. We have to give the world time to catch up with our accomplishments.
There is a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling called “If.”
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
If we can stick with the plan. If we can stay at the table, even though we know we are doing the most likely path, the most probable, even though it is not giving results. If we can stick with it and do that, ours is the earth.
When we reach this plateau, where we don't see results. The steady continuation is what separates the children of the adults.
Failure is logarithmic, success is exponential.
At slot-machines we lose money, that can be regained. But in the slot-machine of life we loose time. Marrying the wrong person, taking the wrong diet, partnering up with the wrong partner. We are going to waste years of our life, and not all the money in the world can bring time back.
Side notes
The reason there are 67 steps, is because it takes precision to go where we want to go. Even a small misstep in direction, one omitted lesson, can make us miss the good life. Comparing it to a space rocket even the most marginal misdirection, will cause the rocket to miss the target by hundreds of miles. Don't miss the good life.
Questions
What is your thing that you have been able to stay with past the 18 month plateau?
Continuing Web Application Development, Growth Hacking and Digital Marketing.
What's an example of something you gave up to quickly on?
Definitely college. I got hot on business and hadn't the patience to stick with the odds of getting my Diploma therefore I dropped out. I am still going to finish it, by enrolling again. I live in Germany, so why not, free education is good.
What is the clear path that you know you should take but have not taken and what is your resolution to get there?
Back to college. Stick with it. Do business on the side. Or fifty-fifty. Hopefully business doesn't go to well, because I am going to stick with college.
- What is an improbable 'horse' that you have been betting on?
Get-rich-quick start up idea. The idea is not bad, not at all. But it is naive to think that I can be a millionaire, when the foundation is unstable. Slow steady foundation and everything else might come.