Hey there! Ever feel like you’re doing everything right—working hard, being consistent, following the rules—but you’re still just hitting the “average” mark? It’s frustrating, right? Well, it turns out you might be playing the game of life with a rulebook that doesn’t actually apply to the big wins you’re looking for. Most of us are taught to live in a world where things average out, like human height or the size of apples on a tree. In that world, if you measure enough people, they all cluster around a middle point. This is what people call a normal distribution. But if you want to find massive success or understand why the world feels so unpredictable, you have to look at a completely different pattern called a power law.
Think about the difference between running a restaurant and writing a book. If you run a cafe, you can only serve so many people a day. You can’t squeeze a million people into one building on a Tuesday night. Your success is based on the average number of customers you get every single night. That’s a “normal” world where consistency is king. But if you’re a book publisher or a YouTuber, the game changes completely. Most books flop, and most videos barely get any views. But then, every once in a while, one hit comes along that is so huge it pays for every single failure you’ve ever had. That’s the power law world. In this world, the “average” doesn’t actually exist because one massive outlier can skew everything.
So, how do you choose the best path or topic for your life? First, you need to figure out which game you’re actually playing. Are you in a world where things just add up, or a world where things multiply? Imagine you’re playing a game where you flip a coin. If you win a dollar for every head, you’ll eventually end up with an average payout. That’s predictable. But what if your winnings doubled every time you tossed the coin? Suddenly, your potential win becomes theoretically infinite. It’s not about being lucky once; it’s about staying in the game long enough to hit that one wild success that outperforms everything else combined.
A great way to understand this is by looking at how we deal with forest fires. For a long time, the policy was to put out every single tiny fire as soon as it started. It sounded like a safe plan. But by stopping the small fires, the forest grew too thick and dense. It became “critical.” Eventually, a single lightning strike caused a megafire so big it destroyed millions of acres. The lesson here is that you need small failures. You should actually want to take small risks that don’t always work out because they prevent the big, catastrophic crashes and prepare you for the big wins.
You see this in the world of investing too. The most successful firms know that more than half of their investments will actually lose money. They don’t mind! They aren’t trying to be right every time. They are just looking for that tiny percentage of companies that will grow ten times or a hundred times over. Those few outliers carry the entire performance of the firm. This means that if you are pursuing a goal governed by these power laws, you shouldn’t be afraid of failing. In fact, you should be making repeated, intelligent bets.
The secret is to focus more on persistence than consistency. If you’re in a “normal” job, showing up and doing the same thing every day works. But if you’re in a power law field—like tech, art, or content creation—you need to do the work as early as possible so you can benefit from the snowball effect. You only need one “hit” to change your entire life. It’s like dropping grains of sand on a pile. Most grains just sit there, but eventually, one single grain will trigger an avalanche that changes the whole shape of the pile. You can’t predict which grain it will be, so your best move is to just keep dropping the sand.
So, take a look at your goals today. Are you playing it safe in a world that rewards big, calculated risks? Stop trying to avoid every little mistake and start making those smart, frequent bets. You might have a dozen failures in a row, but remember, the math of the world shows that the next one could be the one that changes everything for you. Go out there, stay persistent, and start building your own avalanche!
