You probably aren’t planning to be a movie star, or astronaut. But if you are, you know the odds are stacked against you. “Tenured philosophy professor” doesn’t have the same mystique, but you don’t have to be Socrates to figure out that there are a lot more philosophy PhDs than desirable teaching positions.
If you do want to pursue an extremely competitive prize, you’ll need some combination of the following:
Exceptional skill
Exceptional luck
Exceptional conscientiousness
For the very toughest roles, you’ll need all three. Skill because when 1,000 people want to do the same thing, the powers that be can easily filter out the worst 90%. Luck because once you’re at the stage where there’s lots of uber-qualified candidates, you have to be picked. And conscientiousness because when the filter is so narrow, any mistake can be fatal. You’re 15 minutes late for a meeting, or ever got a speeding ticket? Game over.
Nor are jobs without bosses any different. A Twitch streamer needs skill to attract eyeballs, luck to go viral, and conscientiousness to keep up a steady schedule and never have an irrecoverable meltdown.
The ratio is often much less favorable than a happy 1% of hopefuls, but let’s call these 99-1 scenarios. There’s one slot, and 99 people hoping to fill it.
Do I think 99-1 scenarios are always a sucker’s bet? No! Being a successful startup founder is a 99-1 scenario, but if you’re a Harvard student who was a silver medalist at the International Math Olympiad, and so is your best friend, you have a pretty good case for being that 1! And many ordinary people are top 1% at something - I believe that I’m the best Super Smash Bros 64 player in my city,1 and a few thousand locals play occasionally for nostalgic reasons. In fact, I think becoming top 1% at something is an experience that more people should take a crack at; for many activities, simply trying hard and sticking with it is enough.2
But it’s a mistake to think a 99-1 scenario is more like a 50-50 scenario,3 where everyone who tries has a pretty good shot, and a grave mistake to think so when the stakes are your whole life.
Ok. Now that we’re done nodding along to conventional wisdom, it’s time for the interesting part: it’s also a mistake to think a 50-50 scenario is 99-1!
Let’s walk through a couple of examples.
Hot Job Markets
Suppose you get a nursing degree, and hit the job market. You’ve spent a lot of time on various Subreddits for the unemployed, since you yourself were struggling before this career pivot. You think that jobs in general are very hard to find, and don’t viscerally believe your degree will be much help. In fact, you’re mistaken; there are more nurse positions than available nurses, and you’re hired for the very first job you apply to.
If you’re stuck in a 99-1 mindset, and feel desperately lucky to have landed a spot, you’ll make lots of mistakes! You’ll tolerate bad conditions, worry endlessly about getting fired when anything goes wrong, and fail to look into opportunities (like travel nursing) that could better leverage your position. In fact, I think this happens all the time; so many programmers, especially, secretly believe they’ve gotten very lucky and had better never leave their job where people think they’re competent.
In reality, though, a job in a healthy field is much closer to 50-50; the number of jobs and number of job-seekers are close together, so workers have real bargaining power.
Straight Dating
Please don’t take this as my entry to the gender wars, but there are a roughly equal number of straight men and straight women, so finding someone to kiss, date, or marry is not a 99-1 problem. So many arguments about which gender has it worse or how hard it is to find the right person just melt away, when remembering this basic fact. Sure, men are more likely to want casual sex and women are more likely to want to commit early in a relationship, so each gender has advantages in specific situations! But overall, it’s a roughly 50-50 matching problem; grand theories about how dating is now intolerable prove too much. Most people do in fact tolerate it, and pair off.
If a person is stuck in a 99-1 mindset and believes that romance is an unattainable prize, they’re likely to become less confident and thereby less attractive. If they surround themselves with other likeminded people, it can obviously get much worse. Worst of all, someone who thinks they’re on the wrong side of a gender conspiracy will probably start being angry at the opposite sex about it - not a helpful attitude to have about the people you hope to fall in love with!
Failing the 50-50
Just like you really can sometimes be the top 1%, you will sometimes fail to match in a well-balanced market, or even one where you’re advantaged. I hope I’ve established that it’s a mistake to then convince yourself the market is rigged after all; on top of being false, that belief will hurt your chances. So what should you do?
Basically, if the average person in your situation succeeds, and you’re failing, just move towards the average.
If you want to be a professional Starcraft II player, you can read all the Starcraft II guides in the world, but you’ll probably fail, because a vanishingly small percentage of people make that work. But if you want to land a job as an electrician with an electrician certification, reading a guide is a great idea! If you’re trying to become a pop star, you’ll need luck, skill, and a galaxy brained moonshot plan. But if you’re trying to become a business analyst, you can just ask ChatGPT to make sure your cover letter doesn’t have any typos.
Striving to be amazing is exciting, so people often think about the techniques that work in that arena. Part of this is due to mimesis: we see amazing people and want to imitate them, so think the “be amazing” playbook is the best playbook for most situations. But if you’re failing in a situation where being average would be enough, try being average first!
My favorite example of this is when one of my friends went to a highly competitive coding bootcamp, then struggled to find a job for a while. He’s very talented and it eventually worked out fine, but he applied for hundreds of jobs and didn’t get many nibbles. This despite a job market where someone with his new credential and skills should have been a cinch.
As it turned out, his cover letter extolled “the purity of his hatred”. This was a reference to a specific essay, where hatred was a foundational trait that was good for software engineering. HR managers did not get the reference.
Understanding that he was in a 50-50 scenario might have helped him discover this quickly; the job market for his skills was good, so something specific was probably wrong! Not so if he was trying to become a movie star or philosophy professor; in that case, an avalanche of rejections wouldn’t prove a thing.
The dating case is similar. You don’t need pickup artistry esoterica or to become some sort of tradwife thirst trapper. If you’re struggling to find a match, you should start with the most obvious stuff imaginable, like getting a good haircut, taking decent photos of yourself, and cultivating an interest in hobbies that the opposite sex tends to like. (A guy who attends ballroom dancing or a girl who attends video game tournaments won’t be single very long.)
Nor am I meaning to drop truth bombs here; you probably don’t need me to tell you not to put “hatred” in your cover letter. My entire point is that if you notice you’re in a situation where most people succeed, and you’re failing, you should start with all the obvious and easy stuff you can find. Chances are, it’ll be enough!
I generally win all the tournaments, though briefly a national-level threat was here for a postdoc and absolutely cleaned my clock.
Though it’s probably good to lean into your talents; I was by far the worst swimmer on my local swim team, placing last by far in every event. It was fun! But it would have been silly for me to go all in on becoming a swimming champion.
To be clear, I mean a situation where there are about 50 spots and 50 hopefuls, not a coin toss where there’s a 50% chance of success. In fact, the chance of success should be near 100%, if nothing disqualifying happens!