This Probability Principle Changed My Life (And Babe Ruth’s Too)⚾️⚾️

Many people far more wise than I have written books on their life principles.

Ray Dalio released a book literally named “Principles” (and it’s certainly worth checking out).

Charlie Munger also produced Poor Charlie’s Almanac. It’s out of print, but is currently on Amazon for around $60.

It’s worth every penny.

This email is about one of my principles. I don’t claim to be nearly as smart as Charlie, but this has served me well enough. So I’m sharing it with you.

To start, we should talk a little about probability.

Most people think that to “win” in life, it’s about stacking the likelihood of winning in your favor.

So if life was a roll of a die, you’d want it to land in your favor more than 50% of the time.

And we live our lives this way. We want to avoid “losing” as often as possible. We look for the greater than 50% probabilities.

School teaches us this as well. Every test counts. Every decision impacts the next one. All the grades get averaged out into your final GPA.

But here’s the problem with that: in life, all risks are not created equal.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter how many times you lose. And it doesn’t matter how many times you win.

It matters the magnitude of the wins and the losses.

For example, if you’re a guy trying to meet girls. It doesn’t matter how many “no” answers you get before you find the one. It only matters that you find the one eventually.

You could get turned down 1000 times, but still find the person you’re going to marry.

When you win, you win big.

It’s the same in business. Mark Cuban said, “You only have to be right once!”

Your only need one killer marketing campaign.

You can fail as much as you want. As long as when you hit it, you hit it big.

Babe Ruth didn’t just hold the home run record. He also held the strikeout record.

But when he hit, he hit big.

Every good thing in my life: my faith, my wife, my business, my friendships – they all are there because I took a risk.

And before I found each of them, I’d struck out many times. My success rate is probably less than 10%. It’s really quite bad.

But when I won, I won big.

The technical term for this is asymmetric risk. You want the upside payoff to be far better than the downside loss.

This is why I talk a lot about “failing more”. It’s not that I want you to fail. On the contrary, I want you to hit it big. But you can’t hit it big unless you’re in the game.

Striking out is the cost of being in the game.

You can strike out all day, but when that perfect pitch comes, you want to be at bat. That’s how you win the championship.

Your Favorite Marketer,

Tyler @ Analytive

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