I just finished an entertaining new book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by physicist Leonard Mlodinow. Besides reminding me of my inability to assess probabilities, The Drunkard's Walk touches upon some familiar themes regarding uncertainty, highly variable outcomes, and psychological bias.
"[F]or the sake of their own santity," people overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success...
"[M]any of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up"...
What I've learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized...
[W]e ought to identify and appreciate the good luck that we have and recognize the random events that contribute to our success...[A]ppreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not--or have not yet--befallen us.
In the new product invention and development game, we can become more skilled and work more effectively with time, practice, and effort. Competence will improve the odds of success, but guarantees nothing. The quality of inventions may be distributed more or less normally. However, in many or most consumer markets it seems that market rewards are highly skewed. In this business, persistence in the face of failure and humility in success are admirable traits.
I first came across Mlodinow's writing a couple of years ago, when I read an article he had written about how Hollywood genius is ephemeral.
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