Hug the random
A probabilistic view of love, life and the multiverse.
2013 was a great year for us. Moved to a new apartment, took on a new role at work and traveled to places we had only dreamed of. Clearly, this won’t last. All of it makes me feel supremely grateful and lucky. And any stroke of good luck inevitably makes me nervous, because I strongly believe in the multiverse’s sense of humor and always expect something terrible to follow. It also got me thinking about codifying luck and a way to capture this lightning in a bottle again.
Drink -> Gig
Today marks my 2nd anniversary as an official Google employee. One of the things they tell you in orientation is the ratio of applicants to hires is around 50,000 to 1. That felt good to hear. Especially since I found myself in that orientation because I’d decided to do something random 9 months prior.
Spring 2011. My grad school, VCU Brandcenter, was hosting its annual recruiter session. We were 100 nervous grad students finding ways to spruce up our portfolios and present them on our assigned tables to the recruiters visiting us the next day — like a science fair. I decided to keep mine simple and was done setting up my table pretty early in the evening. My rational next thought was to head home and get some rest. On my way out, I bumped into a friend who was a year above us in grad school — she asked if I wanted to grab a drink at The Jefferson. If you live in Richmond, VA you know you never say no to The Jefferson. Two of her classmates joined us; they worked at Google Creative Lab and were in town to recruit writers & designers. I was neither of those things and the Google had never been on my career radar — so it was an agenda-free chat. One drink in I was babbling about my view of metadata and how it will define digital business models of the next 5 years. One of the Googlers found this interesting and shot a note to the Google recruiter at 2 AM. I found myself in an email chain with him and the director of strategy at Creative Lab by 7AM. Things moved pretty quickly and I landed a contractor gig at the Google Creative Lab in the next few weeks — which would turn into full-time gig in 6 months.
A random encounter of getting a drink when I normally wouldn't made the probability of me getting a job at Google non-zero. Non-zero is a great thing. Once your probability of getting something or somewhere is a non-zero you can do little things to slowly push the odds in your favor. You have overcome the inertia of possibility and are now off to the races.
Lemons
Growing up in a very academically competitive country — the premier engineering institutes in India have an acceptance ratio of 2% — giving preference to percentiles and not percentages came naturally to me. In school it didn't matter if you scored a 90 out of a 100, it mattered that not more than 5 kids in the class scored more than you. Percentages are absolutes, percentiles are relative. Your performance alone doesn't decide your merit, you’re dealing with the collective probabilities of the entire classroom.
My first brush with probability theory was in engineering college. Quantum Mechanics is the poster child of probability theory and we got our load of that in Physics classes. We picked up theoretical concepts in Advanced Mathematics, but its practicality showed itself in one of my side projects where I was using principles of evolution to write programs to mine and cluster data. In nature, mutation is an elegant application of randomness. The algorithmic principle used it based on the fact that if you have 1000 solution options and you’re mixing and matching them to find the ideal solution, after a few mix & match sessions all the solutions will start looking more or less the same. You need to inject a bit of randomness to introduce new characteristics in the solutions. They might not get you to the perfect solution, but they’ll take you away from drab homogeneity of a bunch of mediocre solutions (aka Local Optima).
How many times have you failed to build a habit because some new event kept getting in the way? How many times have your perfectly laid dinner plans been kicked by a winter storm? Life is random like that. To improve your odds you should play randomness against randomness. If you’re unable to run for 5 consecutive mornings because of some work emergency or because you couldn't get coffee — try ditching that plan and go biking on a Thursday evening just to piss off the multiverse and scream “TWO CAN PLAY THIS GAME MULTIVERSE!”
When life gives you lemons, make abstract art out of it.
Luck & Skill
What we talk about when we talk about luck is essentially codified probabilities. Privilege is inherited probability advantages. If you’re rich and from a well connected family — you already know someone who can give you a break or can afford to go to a school that someone who matters will be affiliated to. In parallel, willpower is emotionally codified probability. Each time you decide to get off the couch to go for a run you’re boosting your cumulative probability of making running a habit and hence leading to healthy lifestyle (FYI, that’s what I’m currently telling myself to make running a daily habit)
In one of my favorite essays of 2013, on Survivorship Bias, the author talks about psychologist Richard Wiseman’s perspective on this:
“Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else. According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck — bad or good — is just what you call the results of a human being consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others…..Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life.”
I was raised on the premise of “the harder you work, the luckier you get.” I don’t think that’s solely true anymore. Skill + hard work acts as the bedrock of luck; the whole thing about chance favors the prepared mind. Then on it’s up to us to make sure we increase the probability of those skills to be used, seen and recognized widely. It’s just like investing money — you want to hedge against any volatility in the market by investing your skills and work across broad variety of endeavors. That essay also refers to a fellow Googler Barnaby James talking about the same: “skill will allow you to place more bets on the table, but it’s not a guarantee of success.”
Speaking of bets, nowhere is the relationship between luck & skill more apparent than in poker. I know squat about poker, but this post on deadspin drew me in. They’ve crunched a million data points to sift out skill from luck on the poker table. Fascinating experiment — definitely worth a read.
“Put yourself out there”
When people ask us to ‘put yourself out there’ or take risks it feels harder to do because the arguments appeal to our emotional side — and while our emotional side is great at responding to an ad for a puppy shelter, it’s not great when asking us to do something different with outside our comfort zone. Instead of putting it in vague terms of “putting yourself out there” or “keep your options open”, I find it useful to frame everything in terms of probabilities. How are you going to increase your probability of finding a job today? When I was looking for a job, I arbitrarrily chose 0.1 as my probability of converting an application to an offer. This determined how many places I applied to — I had to always have 10 jobs applications in the pipeline for at least one to work out. Depending on how things were progressing I’d increase or decrease that number. Tougher economic conditions meant the probability was lower and I needed to double my applications.
How are you going increase your probability of finding your soulmate? There is still apprehension among some of my friends about online dating, yet they say they really want to find that special someone.
This match.com ad says towards the end “people how use match.com are more likely to find a soul-mate.” — and I go “OF COURSE THEY DO!” The simple fact that you are registered on a dating website increases your probability of having more encounters that will eventually lead to finding a soul-mate. You’re already on level non-zero!
The multiverse doesn't care about you
I love this anecdote about the father of modern probability, Andrei Kolmogorov :
“Kolmogorov’s chance meeting with fellow mathematician Pavel Alexandrov on a canoeing trip in 1929 began an intimate, lifelong friendship. In one of the long, frank letters they exchanged, Alexandrov chastised Kolmogorov for the latter’s interest in talking to strangers on the train, implying that such encounters were too superficial to offer insight into a person’s real character. Kolmogorov objected, taking a radical probabilistic view of social interactions in which people acted as statistical samples of larger groups. “An individual tends to absorb the surrounding spirit and to radiate the acquired lifestyle and worldview to anyone around, not just to a select friend,” he wrote back to Alexandrov.”
Unless you live in a Paulo Coelho bubble-verse, the univ..nay, the multiverse doesn't give a rat’s behind about you. It’s not that the odds are against you or for you — it’s that the odds are irrespective of you. If you, like me, believe in the Many Worlds Theory you can easily see how human beings are walking talking disseminations of probabilities. And the way to use this to our advantage is doing everything we can to increase the probability to attain what we aspire to, and then doing something completely random.
We don’t give serendipity enough credit in governing our lives and we don’t give ourselves credit in engineering that serendipity. Go forth and be random.
