Do you ever wonder what the ratio is between luck and hard work for people who have been
wildly, wildly successful in their lives.
What proportion of their success comes from being in the right place at the right time,
and what comes from actual really hard work?
I came across this guy's blog the other day.
His name is Sebastian Marshall.
He has a post about this theory called the Equal-Odds Rule.
I'm going to get to the details of this rule and how it affects your success, both as a
student and as a professional, in a few seconds, but first, I need to talk about Ira Glass.
Now, you may or may not be familiar with Ira Glass.
Maybe you've listened to This American Life before.
Either way, there's something he said once that stuck with me for a long, long time,
and I want to share it with you.
The quote is pretty long, so I'm just going to give you the gist of it.
Basically, Ira says that people who get into creative fields, do it because they have really,
really killer taste, but when you're getting into it and you're just starting, the ability
to create work that you have doesn't really match up to the taste.
The point of what he was trying to say, is that the only way to start closing this gap
between your taste and your ability to create things that you actually like, is to do a
ridiculous, huge, massive load of work.
Create a giant body of work, and over time, you'll start learning how to create work that
matches up to your taste.
Now, when you do have good taste, you have this tendency to be a perfectionist.
You want to create something that's absolutely perfect the first time.
I had this exact same problem when I wanted to make videos.
I sat down in front of the camera the first time, and I thought, "I'm going to make this
perfect.
It's going to be amazing."
Now, I realize that you can't do that with your first piece of work.
There are going to be things that you don't see.
There are going to be techniques you didn't even know about, and the only way you can
start getting better, and moving that ability closer and closer to that taste level you're
at, is to do a lot of work.
What Ira says is to put yourself on a schedule, to make sure that you get something out every
single week, and what I want to add to that is, kill the perfectionism.
Get your project to 90%, or 95%, or whatever you can do under the time pressure, and then
publish.
This gets us over to the Equal-Odds Rule.
The Equal-Odds Rule says that the average publication of any particular scientist does
not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other
scientist's average publication.
In other words, those scientists who create publications with the most impact, also create
publications with the least impact, and when great publications that make a huge impact
are created, it is just a result of trying enough times.
Now, that's excerpt from an Amazon review for the book that first put this theory out
there, and I'll link to that review in the show notes for this video.
Essentially, what he's trying to say is that scientists who create amazing work, also create
crappy work sometimes.
The reason they do both, is because they create a lot of work.
Really, what it is is they're getting a lot of at bats.
They are putting a lot of things out there.
Some of them are golden eggs and some of them are bad.
A lot of it is just mediocre.
I've actually heard this called the 70/20/10 rule, as well, where 70% of your work is mediocre,
20% is absolutely terrible, and 10% of it is the cream of the crop that rises to the
top and becomes really, really successful.
The takeaway from the Equal-Odds Rule goes right back to what Ira Glass said, you have
to make a lot of things.
The good thing, here, is that in most cases, you're going to be judged on your best work,
unless you're Rebecca Black.
There's a quote from somebody I really admire, named Corbett Barr, and he says, "Write for
the body of work that you want to have in 5 years."
This is actually one of the things that drives me.
Sometimes, I'll look at my blog, or I'll look at what I'm creating on YouTube and think,
"This is really hard.
Maybe I should just go get a job."
Then I stop myself and think, "What do I want to do, what do I want to see in 5 years when
I look back?"
Do I want to be able to see that I made something every single week, or do I want to see that
I stopped halfway through, decided I wasn't very good, and then just quit and did something
else for a while?
Ask yourself that same question.
What do you want to see when you look back in 5 years on your own body of work?
A lesson from the Equal-Odds Rule and Ira Glass' advice leads into a question that I
get asked a lot, and it�s, "How do you get massive amounts of work done in a short amount
of time?"
I'm going to tackle that topic in next week's video, and you can subscribe using the button
below, or the annotation in a few seconds, do that.
Otherwise, thanks for watching this video, and I will see you next week.
Well, hello there, and thank you so much for watching my video on the Equal-Odds Ratio.
Now, if you're ready to start building your own body of work, and you want to go about
it in a more efficient way, then I've got a free book, called "Ten Steps to Earning
Awesome Grades," and you can get your own copy of it by clicking the annotation around
the picture of it right there.
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