I love searching for success secrets.

There must be something ultra successful people know that I don’t.

And if I knew, I would be a lot more successful.

Most of this search is entirely futile.

But turns out, I finally found one.

I’ve been reading Nate Silver’s book “On the Edge”.

One thing he points out is that there basically two kinds of people.

Those who understand game theory and probability, and those who don’t.

People in the first category understand that for any real world game, getting things even somewhat right is hard enough.

Probabilities are usually the best you can do.

This is not a natural way of thinking for most people. Most people are in the second category.

When someone makes the prediction that Trump will become president with 29% probability and he does, most people think that the prediction was horribly wrong.

But when everone else was predicting 17% probability, 29% was actually a pretty good prediction. And you could make a lot of money betting on it.

17% means a 5 to one chance of winning, so if you bet 100 dollars and Trump becomes president, you would win 500 dollars.

If Trump loses, you of course lose your 100 dollars.

This means the expected value is ($500 * 0.29) - ($100 * 0.71) = $74.

So if you trust the 29% model, taking this bet is a nobrainer.

But most people cannot wrap their heads around this.

People with a deep grasp of probability tend to be more successful and not necessarily because they are better at gambling.

It also doesn’t matter whether or not people understand it in the language of mathematics.

What matters is that they have a better grasp of reality.

Without an implicit or explicit understanding probabilities and the role they play in the world, you feel like a failure when you fail.

But with it you know that you know that failing is an inevitable part of any real world game. It’s simply how probabilities work.

The best founders do not put their head in the sand when a product fails.

The best marketers do not give up when a campaign fails.

The best scientists do not stop when 12 experiments in a row fail.

The best athletes do not get mad when a dribble fails or a shot goes far off target.

The best writers just keep publishing even if there is no resonance.

The people best at friendships keep proposing plans even keep getting rejected.

Most people give up after 3 or 4 tries.

They get paralyzed by their failures or mediocre past success.

They start overanalyzing to find a better way of doing things.

They become unable to try even one more time.

There is a pattern. It doesn’t work. I’m not meant to do this.

But the most successful people have internalized that everything requires far more tries than you would naively think.

It’s not 3 or 4 tries. It’s hundreds.

Everyone is failing all the time.

But successful people forget failures quickly and just keep going.

They know that no one remembers their failures.

Lionel Messi loses the ball dozens of times each game. He plays dumb passes and misses shots left and right.

But all that people remember is that one succsful dribbling that ended in a goal.

No one gives a damn about Brian Armstrong’s silly projects that failed. All they remember is Coinbase.

Successful people don’t feel like the pressure is mounting with each failure.

They have an infinite resorvoir of IDGAF energy.