This post is pointless, in the sense that I don’t know that it will have a firm conclusion.
Instead, I just want to bring-to-light a concept I’ve been thinking about lately.
Essentially, that sometimes the outcome is not at all determined by the inputs that go into it.
Some obvious insights from this are more or less extensions of the post I wrote about being careful what lessons you learn from failures.
First, let me explain exactly what I mean with some examples.
What made me think of this is disc golf. There are tons of examples of this.
The most obvious ones are where your throw your disc and it ends up with a fluke roll that ends up far from where it landed.
Now, at the elite level, you are always considering the possibility of these types of outcomes and doing what you can to prevent them. But even then, they will happen sometimes.
So let’s say, as is often the case, that you’re playing a hole in which most of it is blind. You only see the early portion of the flight path.
You throw the disc, and you think it’s looking good. However, once you get down there, you realize that the disc actually ended up a good 100 feet beyond the pin.
“I guess I’ll just throw it way less hard next time,” you say to yourself. You’ve come to the conclusion that you threw it way too hard this time, and you need to compensate for this next time.
The problem is, you didn’t. You actually got a fluke roll, where the disc landed, popped and perfectly on to its side, and then proceeded another 100+ feet beyond.
But since you couldn’t see this happen, you only know your inputs (how you threw it) and the outcome (where it landed). You don’t have the full story of what happened in the middle.
This result is essentially noise. Using it as a learning experience will be actively detrimental to you. As you play more, you may start to sense better when things are flukes, and not learn from them. But in the short-term, they may actively hurt your ability to progress, as you test out different inputs and seemingly get random results.
As another example, I was playing with my friend Zac and, a couple times, he let loose what was actually a perfect throw. Form was great, release was great, and the disc was launched perfectly.
And it went terribly.
The disc just barely clipped a tree and bounced deep into the woods.
Now this case is actually a bit different, because he had far more control over the inputs and actually could fix this.
The problem in this case is that he’s likely to learn the wrong lesson. Despite throwing with perfect form, the feedback that he got is that he did a bad job. He is likely to change his throw going forward.
Now, there is probably a correct lesson to be learned in this case, and it’s that he should aim ever-so-slightly more to one side to avoid that tree. But instead, he may very well blame the other aspects of the throw.
So really these are two different – but related – concepts.
In the first example, the input really was almost completely disconnected from the output. In the second, they were connected but the wrong input was likely to be blamed.
In other areas in life and business, this is likely to happen almost constantly. It’s extremely difficult to identify exactly what makes you successful in most areas. And in both successes and failures, you are quite likely to blame the wrong input for them and proceed accordingly.
It’s like when a lottery winner outlines their “strategies” for success, when they obviously were totally irrelevant. The only factor that mattered was actually dumb luck.
If I had to come up with some kind of conclusion, I would just say that it’s incredibly important to:
- Recognize when the results of something are caused primarily by factors outside your control
- Be sure not incorrectly identify which of your efforts actually caused a success or failure
I think part of what makes experience so incredibly valuable is that these things start to come naturally to you. You’ve had enough data points that you know when something is a fluke, you know what should work, and you can start to pick up what you did wrong if it really was your fault.
I think about my own business and the work we do, and how I can approach almost any situation – including ones that I haven’t directly worked on before – with way more confidence. I have an intuitive sense of what will work and what won’t, and know that I can figure most things out without messing anything up too badly.
And that comes from experience. I’ve done it all before. I’ve done a new thing for the first time thousands of times, and so I know what the process is like.
I remember when I was first starting and I would often be forced to just try things blindly without having any sense of how they would go. But that’s how I learned and gained experience. And with that experience comes wisdom.
In disc golf, I’ve noticed the more I play (especially when replaying certain courses), that I am able to sense when things are a fluke. Sometimes my disc will end somewhere and I’ll conclude, “okay that definitely rolled there, because there’s no way it went that far on the fly”. And that helps me learn going forward.
Again, I don’t have a firm conclusion for this, it’s just a concept I wanted to formally write about because it may have big consequences in many areas of life and business.