Scott Adams
@ScottAdamsSays
(March 15, 2024)

I live my life as if the odds don’t apply to me for anything related to success. And sure enough, my life unfolded as if that were true.

Feels like magic, but that’s probably an illusion caused by me consistently not understanding the true odds of things.

For example, I’m not a great artist, and I’m usually not the funniest person in any crowded room. So, for years, I incorrectly assumed I did not have the skill to be a professional cartoonist. If I had been better at calculating my odds, I would have understood that being good-but-not-great at several complementary skills made my odds of success surprisingly good.

I could give you a dozen more examples where my common sense estimation of the odds was way off. For example, I didn’t know that simply showing up for work and doing what I said I would do could put me in the top 10% of performers. But it did. I also believed promotions would be solely based on performance, but they weren’t.

I was very bad at estimating the odds of things.

Eventually, I figured out a mental hack (a reframe) for avoiding being “trapped by the odds”: I told myself the odds didn’t apply to me.

It felt good to think of it that way, but what it really meant was that I could not accurately predict my own future. But what I COULD do was steadily acquire a suite of complementary skills that would fit a lot of different opportunities and then try a bunch of things that wouldn’t kill me if they failed.

90% of the things I have tried in life have failed. So I tried fifty things that didn’t kill me and got five solid wins.

Summary: Sometimes your odds are bad and sometimes you are bad at estimating the odds.

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