People are always looking for a secret trick or technique for success and to get ahead, I think this is possibly the only thing close to that.
I must warn you, it’s not something you’ll be happy or satisfied hearing about because it’s not what most people expect, also it’s very simple, anyone can use it.
Once you learn the law of averages, a switch flips in your brain and you find yourself thinking about it whenever you try to accomplish something new.
What Is The Law Of Averages?
The law of averages is not a law of physics but a law of statistics, let’s say you are a door to door salesmen and you are selling vacuums to residents in an apartment building.
Your goal is to reach 10 sales for the day, and there are 500 residents
As you start on the bottom floor, you will get discouraged as most if not everyone will reject your offer, but as you keep making offers to people on each floor, you increase your chance of getting a sale.
By the time you reach the top floor, you should have already made your sales goal.
It’s like cranking a free infinite slot machine, with enough tries you are guaranteed a win, the only thing you pay with is time and effort.
How We Can Apply This To Our Lives
If you have a goal in mind (for this example we will use gaining traffic for a website), you can keep making attempts over and over until you get where you want to go.
So if you want traffic for a website the best way to do that is to keep making pieces of content that you can promote and get indexed on the google search engine.
If you have more content on your site then eventually one piece of content is going to go viral.
The more quality content you churn out on a daily basis the higher your chance of going viral.
How This Is Directly Related To The Compound Effect
The Compound Effect is almost the same law, but it focuses more on the consistency aspect instead of the probability aspect.
The compound effect states that small changes in a single direction over a certain amount of time will always get you to your goal.
So if you are trying to lose weight, gradually eliminating unhealthy food habits from your daily routine will make you skinny.
If you want money, spending time every day on building a business will make you rich.
The law of averages principle agrees with this mindset and says, if you make the change in your life as drastic as you can handle, you’ll get your results faster.
If you went from just producing one piece of content a week for your website, to do it once a day, your numbers over time should do much better if you can maintain the quality of your content.
How Is This Any Different From Gambler’s Fallacy?
Gambler’s fallacy: a gambler’s belief that the more you play at a casino, the higher the chance of you winning. So if you are losing, it is best to keep playing.
This is, of course, wrong because casino games are slight to massively rigged to keep the odds in the house’s favour.
Real-life isn’t a casino and I believe that anyone who goes out and tries to achieve a goal can do it if they devote enough time and effort to it.
The law of averages can only fail when you are not improving your efforts with each attempt. You have to look at the data you are getting from your efforts and use it to improve your next try.
This is what big successful companies do, they throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks.
The key is to take the thing that sticks and make it stickier if you get my metaphor.
In Conclusion
Learning the law of averages totally changed my perspective on finding success and motivated me to keep making these attempts and making improved iterations over and over.
If you don’t understand the law of averages, each failure will feel useless and de-motivating, but if you realize that with each attempt you get closer and closer to your goal, it just makes you want to try more and more.
Because you know eventually you’ll get there.