Better Than Random

I look back to certain periods of my life and giggle at how little control I had. Huge life happenings resulting from a swipe right, a moldy house, a random person moving out of an apartment, a friend’s dad sticking up for me, an email sent to an old group of friends, an innocuous chat with a stranger. 

It got me thinking: What expectations should you have of yourself in a life you can’t predict?

Recently, Jon Stewart (of The Daily Show) was talking to the Chicago Fed president, Austan Goolsbee, about economics and monetary policy and Goolsbee said something that might help answer the question.

He said that most academic economists think long-term forecasting is not doable. There are too many inputs and variables. He joked, "Better than random is the highest bar that we can aspire to."

Better than random.

So if the President of the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago thinks that the best he can be at predicting the things he’s paid to predict is better than random, maybe that should be our benchmark in life. 

Does that mean that we shouldn't try? That we shouldn't plan, and strategize, and network? Since better than random seems pretty much identical to completely random? No. When Jon Stewart said to Goolsbee, "This makes you skeptical of forecasting then, right?”, Goolsbee replied, "And yet, it has to be done."

The work still has to be done because better than random is pretty damn good.

How good? Just ask casinos.

Including dollar and volume averages for slots, craps, blackjack and roulette, a casino holds a roughly 55-56% chance of winning.

That's better than random. And that's why the house always wins.

The casino doesn't have to grind for its edge though—it's baked into the rules of the games. We don't get that luxury. Our edge has to be earned by setting our feet firmly on that tiny postage stamp of real estate called: intentionality.

Even though we are at the mercy of the family we are born into, times we grow up in, the borders we are confined to, and the chance encounters that shape our choices, we still get to enact some agency and ask, "What verbs will I own today?"

So, you’ll put in all this work, and study, and doubt, and make connections, and bite your tongue, and feel your heart flutter, only for a chance slightly more in your favor than flipping a coin? 

Yup, and the next day, you’ll be asked to do it again.

Over time, better than random means you showed up, that you bounced back, made adjustments, and gave odds a chance so that at the end of each day, more often than not, you stockpiled little wins just like a casino.

It’s the compounding of those little wins—wins that you can’t even feel—that transforms better than random into better things in life.