Shifting the odds
Written on Thursday, February 06, 2014 by Rohan Koshy
The world is probabilistic. While this statement may seem fairly obvious and matter of fact, it is seemingly very easy to forget this fact and how it affects the outcomes in the world and more importantly, how we view them. This mindset may seem natural to many (especially those with a higher IQ) but the more i closely observe my own conclusions from events in my life and the conclusions that others draw from their own lives, the more it becomes apparent that developing a probabilistic mindset is an incredibly hard.
The world is probabilistic. That statement means, that outcomes are not actually written in stone. There is no one outcome that will always happen in a situation. There are a range of outcomes that might happen and only one of them does. Most outcomes of the world are random, but a majority of these random outcomes are a mixture of skill, grit and luck.
Sliding Scale
Outcomes that we see must be looked at across a luck/skill sliding scale. At one end of the scale, outcomes are completely random, like the flip of a coin. On the other end is a game like chess, which has an extremely small element of luck - The better chess player will probably win 999 out of a 1000 games (he'd probably be drunk for the other game)
Consider the statements - "It wasn't meant to be" and "You got very lucky there". These statements represent a deterministic view of the world, as if the outcome itself was predetermined. Reality it seems to me, is different. Any outcome that we wish for ourselves, like getting a job, getting married or making successful investments starts out with the odds involving a mix of luck and skill/grit. It could be 50:50 or 80:20 or 10:90. The odds themselves are different for each task. Its obvious to everyone that that almost all endeavors involve some parts that are NOT luck. Lets say that the odds start out at 50:50. Our job essentially becomes to, through grit, skill and sheer persistence, to shift the odds the outcome. By doing this we may bring it to 80:20 or 90:10.
The exciting/terrifying part about life is ... we almost never know the odds of success in any endeavor. Lets say your deciding whether to continue to work for the same company or switch to a competitor. While the immediate odds of getting a hike are easy to see, its almost impossible to see what team you'd join, predict whether the new company would do worse than your present one and whether you'd get a good boss when you join. Just ask anyone who joined Infosys or Satyam just before these companies ran into difficulty. You could make the same decision today and have a completely different outcome. So, the odds become visible to us only in hindsight. We seem to trust blindly that things will work out, because in essence that's the most rational thing to do. If we ever worried about everything that could go wrong, we'd find it difficult to take any action at all.
Once we've figured out that we're only improving the odds, we may need to prepare ourselves for unexpected or terrible outcomes. How do those come about? Largely it might be because we don't plan thoroughly. Many times though, it's because we are unable to eliminate the element of luck. Luck can take many forms but by definition will include events or twists in the tale that are entirely unexpected. Only in hindsight can you see it. You may question - "How'd i miss seeing that?" That question is in error. By definition, you cannot see blind spots.
Handling the Impostors
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same" - If by Rudyard Kipling
One of the biggest shifts that occur once you understand the probabilistic nature of the world, is that you start to see alternate outcomes just as clearly as the outcomes that actually happen. This produces a mind bending shift where you are able to see success and failure in any endeavour, as what they are - Impostors.
Impostors, because they represent only one of the possible outcomes that happened and not a one to one outcome. You could repeat what you did and not succeed. On the flip side, you need not be disheartened if something didn't work out. If you gave it everything you could. IF. You're only trying to change the odds. That is all that you can do.
When you realize that the outcome you see is only one of the possible outcomes that could have happened, you start to forget about things like fate, destiny and start to replace them with chance and randomness. What you see is what the odds were BEFORE the event and what influenced those odds. You start to judge the outcome not by what happened but by the process that made it happen.
One of the biggest outcomes of looking at success and failure as impostors is it immediately releases an enormous amount of pressure. You no more look at successful individuals as Gods and stop judging failures as terrible people.No one starts to become above or beneath you. True, success is rarely the outcome of pure luck. It usually occurs when preparation meets opportunity and grit guides you through the difficult moments. However it is almost never truly about skill/talent either. Success leaves clues but very rarely can it be repeated as is.
If you look at actors who currently rule the box office, none will seem like the best actor in the field or the best looking or the best dancer. Almost all have benefited from an enormous amount of luck. This you can see if you go back 25 years and look at all the other actors that were around. You wouldn't really be able to pick which ones would become superstars and which ones would vanish without a trace.
"Its a sin to judge any man by his post" - St. Augustine in "The City of God,"
Translated - Hold on to your judgement when you look at a successful/failed person. You cannot hope to see what twists of luck affected their lives.
If you've failed at something, you simply go back and see if you could have shifted the odds somehow by doing more. If you could have, then you've failed. It you couldn't have, then luck played its part and you walk away content that this outcome is simply chance.The difficult part is figuring whether there was/wasn't anything more you could have done. It is rarely the case that we have given everything we could have in pursuit of an outcome
Understanding that neither your success or your failures are completely your fault will keep you humble through the good times and calm through the difficult ones. Maybe what we need is a kindler, gentler definition of success and failure
Dealing with Tragedy
If you believe that the majority of the world outcomes are at random, you are likely to keep your own tragedies in perspective. No matter what happens in your life, it almost never will go through phases of grief that will equal those who were born in any previous century, or those who experienced the holocaust or the partition or World War II. You will notice that everyone, bar none, will go through tragedy, So you're not alone in experiencing grief. You suffer grief alone, but lonely in your own grief, you are walking in a crowd, each carrying their weights of grief.
Understanding the probabilistic nature of things will ensure you never to ask yourself the question - "Why me"? Besides time, nothing in life is equal. Neither do we having the same starting line, nor do we run on the same track. We don't even have the same running abilities. It is simply random what we get when we're born and at what times the wind is at our back or in our face. Crucially, this isn't a pessimistic view but a liberating one. Since none of us are equal, success/failure for each one is different. We simply have no scale to judge anyone or to BE judged, thus liberating us from the notion of success defined as relative achievements of fame, beauty, sales or networth.
So if it's all random and tragedy will come, how do we deal? Maybe,we simply choose our response. Choice is our own decision. Just like we carry grief alone, we carry choice alone too. It does not depend on chance and thus is truly in our control. This is of course easy to say but incredibly difficult to do. For anyone who has gone through a difficult period, every second can seem like its designed to, like Chinese water torture, slowly eat at us. However, In all probability the torture is mental and not physical. In essence, our own thoughts drip like acid eroding our ability to function for a time. Yet over time, fatigue over the pain seems to set in. Human beings show an incredible ability to adapt. Part of that is beginning to remember that there is always something to live for and that tragedy, no matter how many times you look back to see if you could have done something else, is in essence, large parts of luck. Tragedy comes to us all, some bear unusual amounts, but almost none really seem to deserve all of it. So if it does come, we simply have to accept that we are required to take it.
"Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates" - JK Rowling.
Grit and shifting the odds
"You make your own luck". This sentence is now of course famous because it denotes the power we all have in us. The ability to take massive action, bear massive pain and display persistence in the face of terrible odds is hallmark of the power we have displayed. Grit, it seems is more important than anything else. Yet in a probabilistic world, the chances of success are never 100%. Worse, we don't even know the odds. So what do we do?
The short answer simply seems to be- to persist. Failure seems to make us ponder, it seems to strip away the inessential, makes us question our own view of ourselves. Having a probalistic view can increase our ability to persist. This is because we don't ever view success or failure or certain or completely of our own doing. We simply look at every endeavour as having certain odds of success. Our job is simply to tilt the odds as much as we can. Sometimes it means cutting out many areas of our lives to focus, sometimes it means giving more of ourselves to someone without receiving in return and sometimes it means simply waiting in the hope that things will turn in our favor and continuing to do what we've done. Sometimes it simply requires us to wait and not get tired of waiting for an outcome. You don't know the odds, you simply know how much you are willing to suffer for what you want. So we tilt the odds as much as we can and when the outcome is certain, we walk away (or forward).
The world is so hopelessly complicated and dependent of the behavior of irrational humans that a huge number of things have to go right for you to get what you want. Understanding the odds of this happening simply allows you not to get disheartened by failure or arrogant by success.
"We don't make our own luck. We simply change the odds so luck has very little part to play.We don't eliminate uncertainty. We only give it everything we've got and let the chips fall where they may"
Fat Tails
"In the long run , we are all dead" - John Maynard Keynes
Our lives essentially revolve around fat tails. Almost everything that occurs or that we achieve is an improbable, against the odds event. So while we focus on the long run, we need to complement that serene view with an intensity born out of understanding that time is limited for us. This allows to fill our days to the brim, to move on quickly after we fall down and spend little time pointlessly looking back at the past.
Is this India, Mr Columbus?
This post isn't meant to be a nike advert. It isn't meant for anyone to go out and Just do it, believing somehow that with loads of hard work anything is possible. Its meant to bring about a more tacit understanding that no matter what you do , how hard you work and what risks you take, you may still end up failing.
I think its better to look at our lives not as being deterministic in the sense that with hard work and grit, anything is possible. I think its better to look at our lives as sailing ships. You start out with a particular boat (some exceptional , some terrible, most average) and with some sailing abilities. We work everyday to become better sailors, to read the winds and waves as they occur. Yet like Columbus we never arrive exactly where we wanted to and who we wanted to with. Some stay with us throughout our journey, some get onto our boats at certain ports and may get off at others(whether we want them to or not) and a rare few will come to become our lifelong companions, forever helping us to navigate the high seas. Nothing is certain on this journey and yet that is ours to enjoy, not curse. We have a destination in mind, but we are forever shifting course.
If we look at our lives as having alternating periods of high winds, sometimes strong and at our back, sometimes difficult and in our face and sometimes there is no wind at all, we are likely deal with the lean and difficult periods as a sailor would, with patience. Yet like a sailor, we must learn to adapt when the winds change and act and not worry too much on what plans we had set initially and what the consequences would be. Not even the very wise can see all ends.
Our lives are tremendously shaped by the winds which we encounter, so much so that sometimes we can feel helpless in face of luck, which has a temperament all its own. So what are we to do? Maybe, we simply decide how to face those winds and not worry that we may not end up exactly where we planned. We don't choose the winds that rock our boats, we only choose between spending our lives trying to adapt to them and use them to benefit or giving up fighting with them completely and letting them take us where we may and enjoying the journey.
As always, no matter where i go with my thoughts, a poet has gone there before me.
To be, or not to be, that is the question—
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
So go out there and in a sense Just Do it. Just Shift the Odds.
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Really liked the last part...
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Nice post. I agree with most parts.
The debate between luck and hardwork is endless. Lets face it, sometimes we get lucky, sometimes we don’t. But success ought to be a combination of luck and hardwork (except if you win the lottery!) In the CAT exams the difference between a 99%iler and a 100%iler is sheer luck. However to get to a point where you score above 97%ile is a result of sheer hardwork.
The part of making a choice is actually the most difficult one though. Its the time when you are calculating the odds and have the opportunity to shift the odds in your favour. And no amount of experience / probability theory can help us make unbiased choices. Happy souls are made up of biased choices. Choices biased with the desirable outcome.
Another thing is about hindsight and blind spots. I think experience plays a big big role. Although you may not know the outcome for sure, but a review of things in hindsight helps you understand better the odds of events that may happen due to particular choices. In that context, yes, many a times we fall into the hindsight error / trap, but more often it will give us indications on what combination of causes led us to a particular effect. That is very important and quite significantly influences a lot of decisions. Parents use their wisdom/experiences/lessons to raise kids and that pretty much determines the kid's life. Their mistakes can also help shape their kids’ future.
Its not very often that we can ‘Just Do It’. It sounds more romantic than it actually is. More often than not, there have been instances where one has burnt their hands doing things by instinct and out brain learns from those instances. Its not to blame. Experience makes the learning curve less steep and (quite frankly) less painful. And slowly the child inside us (the one who ‘just does it’ and makes mistakes) becomes an adult. Even if we try.. the balance between the two is quite challenging and its easier said than done.
But even though life isn’t as competitive as ‘The Hunger Games’, lets just hope that “May the odds ever be in your favour”.