(Skill + Luck)*Tolerance = Success

Hi, 

In the past, I have written about activity based accounting for getting what you want. The summary is what actions do I need to take in order to get the thing that I want. In business terms, that will usually look like dollars spent in order to get something done. In our lives, that will look like hours mowing a lawn, moments cooking dinners, or exercising to get the outcomes we are looking for. 

There is another layer to this that I didn’t originally consider when I wrote that newsletter and it comes down to skill and luck. 

Skill takes action and multiplies it to get the outcome with less work than someone else who is less skilled. 

Luck takes the macro and micro environment into account and can accelerate or decelerate the outcome based on variance. 

When high skill meets positive luck outcomes can be expedited, and when low skill and negative luck meet it will slow down progress to a halt.  

For my consulting friends out there, I am sure you have a 2:2 already built in your head. 

The issue with this is that we think that these events predict future events, or even worse we can be acting with low skill and high luck and get a favorable outcome and attribute it to high skill and no luck. 

If you fall into that trap, the next time you set out to do something you are expecting it to take 3 actions and it will actually require 10. If you really fell in the trap, you will probably give up at 7. 

Chris Williamson has a different spin on this idea, he calls it the Curse of Competence which is where you essentially set success at a given thing as the bare minimum requirement. 

When your base line stat on the skill spectrum is neutral over the course of all the tasks in your life and then you find one or two that are lower it is going to feel uncomfortable. 

AND it should. You have been bad at things the exact amount of times you have seen lightning strike the same place twice or seen aliens or pigs fly or whatever analogy you want to put in there. 

It is genuinely new. 

Now that my consultant friends have a firmly established 2:2 I am going to pull the sheet from underneath it. 

There is a third factor at play. Tolerance. 

Specifically, failure tolerance. How long are you willing to be bad at something before you give up? 

Are you willing to put in 100 attempts? Are you willing to put in 1,000 attempts? How long will you go towards something without getting it before you stop? 

There is a scene in Avengers Infinity War where Doctor Strange looks into the future and says something along the lines of, “out of 14 million possible futures, there is only 1 where we win.”

Are you willing to explore each possibility to find the one that works for you? 

Okay, now we have the three factors: Skill, Luck, and Tolerance. We also have the idea of Activity Based Accounting. 

So what does it all mean? 

The first thing to cover is mentorship and close confidants. 

When you have people who you trust know you well enough and are also able to see you relatively unbiased you are in a position to understand what you are actually skilled at. 

Knowing your skill level before you start a project will help you understand how many activities it will take to get the outcome as long as luck is neutral. 

When you have a clear understanding of how many activities it will take you, you will have a higher tolerance. (I wrote another newsletter about this: Infinite Games)

The next thing is timing. If you know when you want something, it will help you make a plan. For example, if you know it will take 100 activities to get your outcome with neutral luck and you need to have that outcome in 100 days. You can plan to do 1 activity a day. 

The last thing is knowledge that you aren’t a fixed system. You are going to be better at things at different times of your life. If you want a six pack, it will take more activities in your 60s than your 20s. But, there will also be things you are better at when you are older than when you were younger because of life experience and context. 

So why say all of this? 

I have been talking about the right kind of failure recently, but even when you have the right definition it doesn’t mean that it feels better. Also, when we are playing games that do not have definitive ends to them, the real failure could be stopping short and not knowing it. 

When we understand all that goes into something in order for it to go the way we want, we can better prepare ourselves for the road. 

And sometimes we can set out for one destination and end up somewhere else entirely. And sometimes, that is the 1 out of 14 million outcomes that works out. 

Happy Sunday, 

Kyle