Tag: Luck

Experience = Overconfidence

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity GuyLeave a comment

Expertise is worth its weight in gold.

But overconfidence will kill you eventually.

Risky behaviour might pay off once or twice or even more, but eventually all of your chickens will come home to roost.

‘Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence.’ (Michael Lewis quoting Carter Mecher)

Or as Nassim Taleb puts it, when talking about the attribution bias, ‘You attribute your success to skills but your failures to randomness’.

Statistically, someone is bound to succeed through risk taking and luck, just as someone else is bound to fail miserably through taking the exact same risks and having bad luck.

We live in a wicked world with complex problems, and we behave as if we live in a kind world, with simple problems. Generally, it seems to work for us when things are stable, but stability is never guaranteed and there are occasions when everything gets disrupted. (They seem to be happening semi-often at the moment).

If you’re environment is telling you that you are great at something, and paying you handsomely to do that thing, you will begin to believe that you are great at it and deserve to be paid well for doing it. But what if you are not actually great at it? What if it is just a matter of luck that has landed you in a place that has made things fall in such a way that it doesn’t matter what you do everything works well for you…until it doesn’t?

The answer is humility. Recognising that you could be wrong about something. About anything. Entertaining that thought, even just for a moment is an act of generosity to you and those around you.

What are the chances?

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity Guy2 Comments

Out of every person that was born when I was born, what are the chances that I was born in Australia?

In the year I was born (which you can guess at), there were 124,287,658 other babies born in the world. In Australia there were 223,034 other babies born in that same year.

That means that I had a 1 in 557 chance of being born in Australia.

At the same time there were approximately 65,000,000 children born in Asia, most of which, at that time, were born into poverty. So, going on the numbers, in the year that I was born, there was approximately a 1 in 2 chance of being born in Asia, most likely into poverty. That doesn’t take into account the African continent at all. The numbers get pretty intense at that point.

Suffice to say, the chances of me being born into a country that wasn’t experiencing debilitating poverty were slim at best. But here I am, lucky I guess.

So, what’s the point?

The concept of the ‘self-made man’ or ‘self-made woman’ start to lose meaning for me at this juncture. I find it a little amusing when people start talking about how they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps to get to where they are, or that it was only through their hard work and skill that they have succeeded in life.

More and more I strongly doubt those assertions. Hard work is definitely necessary in life, but looking at the odds laid out above (and this is just location of birth), I think it is more to do with luck than anything else. Where you were born, your gender, your race, your family of origin, all of these have a huge effect on your life before you even get the chance to start working hard.