Easy to Expect. Hard to Predict.
Don’t set outlier expectations on what you do. Beethoven didn’t even know what his greatest hits might be.
If you did something and achieved success 38% of the time, would you be happy with yourself? Short answer: probably not. Long answer: it depends.
Currently, the MLB leader in batting average, Mookie Betts, is batting .377. In other words, forgetting everything else outside of hits, he is “successful” in hitting the ball 37.7% of the time he goes to the plate in the 31 games he has played thus far this season. Yes, the sample size is small, but the league-wide batting average in the MLB has hovered around .250, or 25% of plate appearances being hits, over the past few years. Even worse. If you asked an MLB player if they were happy with this 38% success rate, I am sure you would get a resounding yes.
But imagine if an MLB player went to the plate every time and expected to get a hit. Most of the time, they would walk away disappointed and unhappy. For them to expect this would be unreasonable, everyone would agree. The league average is not 100%, it is 25%. No matter how much we realize we can’t do things well 100% of the time, we still always expect the things we do to be a smashing success. Then when they aren’t smashing successes, we get frustrated.
Very rarely do we price in or want to price in the bad moments. Very rarely do we expect something to flop. We write a piece and we are shocked when it doesn’t go viral. We produce a YouTube video and we struggle to fathom how it is not an overnight sensation. We post a picture to Instagram and can’t understand why it didn’t perform well relative to others. We have come to routinely expect greatness but reread that sentence, it is crazy to expect that.
The scary part of this is happiness is derived from our expectations. How we view anything is relative to the expectations we set forth. To ever be happy or content, you need your expectations to be exceeded.
If you ask a kid who plays basketball who he wants to be like when he grows up, good chance they say LeBron James or Michael Jordan. No player says I aspire to be a role player in the NBA, play professionally in Europe, or simply, just have a good college career. All of the other options would be huge successes too, but we spend life chasing the outlier outcomes. The same applies to money. Everyone wants to be a millionaire. No one says I want to be above average and earn more than $59,384 per year, the median salary of full-time workers in Q4 of 2023 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We try to normalize outlier results by making it the expectation of what we hope to achieve, except outliers are outliers for a reason.
They aren’t normal.
Much of what makes outliers, well outliers, are things that are out of our control. And as much as we want to control life, and yes agency is a beautiful thing, we can’t control a large part of it. We have no idea how things may go. And to expect everything to go well is to assume life is predictable. Life is anything but predictable. It is random. Life depends on others and to try and predict how others may react is one way to go crazy. Robert Sapolsky talks about how much of our life is unpredictable in the book Determined,
“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”
Trying to predict the success of something is hard. It depends on humans. Inevitably, human behavior is one act influenced by a previous act, which was influenced by a behavior before that, and something before that, and it goes on. It is a series of acts in the past that influences a series of acts in the future and how those past acts will actually influence the future, who knows. One of the biggest hit songs of the last year explains it well.
David Guetta went on the podcast Impaulsive and talked about the creation of the hit song “I’m Good (Blue)” he made with Bebe Rexha. It started when both were in London one day and decided to get together and produce some music. On that day, one of the songs they made was “I’m Good (Blue)”. However, at the end of the day, they decided that nothing they made that day was worth releasing. It was a solid music production session but nothing really moved the needle.
Fast forward a few days down the road and Guetta decides to play a sample of “I’m Good (Blue)” in his live set while at the Ultra music festival. The song was received well but after the festival, it was lost into the abyss and kept on Guetta’s hard drive. Still not to be released.
That was until someone on the internet had other plans. The song was not going to die. Someone, Guetta mentions on the podcast he has no idea who, takes the sample of the song from the set and puts it on TikTok as an audio that can be used in videos. Not too much later on, the song goes viral on TikTok, even though it has never been released by its creators. The power of the internet. A song once deemed to not be worthy is now released by Bebe and David thanks to it randomly going viral.
Today, that song has 1,582,767,396 streams on Spotify and is now both David Guetta and Bebe Rexha’s most popular song. That is over one billion streams. A song that was once deemed to be unworthy by both.
Don't chase virality. Don‘t tie your success to something that won’t satisfy. At a certain point, you don’t even know what you are chasing because you have no idea if something will even be successful. David Guetta, a man with 73.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify, probably knows a thing or two about creating music that resonates with people. But he had no idea that his hit song and most popular song was actually any good. We never know. Studies even show it.
Dean Simonton, a psychologist, has spent his career studying creative productivity. He has found that even creative geniuses, what some may call David Guetta, have a hard time recognizing when they have a hit. Simonton spent some time studying Beethoven and spoke about him,
“Beethoven’s own favorites among his symphonies, sonatas, and quartets are not those frequently performed and recorded by posterity.”
Adam Grant further describes this idea well in Originals,
“In Beethoven’s most celebrated work, the Fifth Symphony, he scrapped the conclusion of the first movement because it felt too short, only to come back to it later. Had Beethoven been able to distinguish an extraordinary from ordinary work, he would have accepted his composition immediately as a hit.”
Beethoven, one of the most iconic figures in the history of Western and classical music, couldn’t always tell when he had great work. It was a continual effort to try and figure it out. He had some semblance of an idea of what may resonate with people but he didn’t know out of absolute certainty. If Beethoven, who had been practicing for eight hours a day since the age of seven, didn’t know what his greatest hits might be then there is no way for us to know either.
Don’t tie your expectations to virality. If something you make, produce, write, etc. doesn’t go viral or isn’t a hit, that does not mean it wasn’t successful. It just means it wasn’t an outlier. Don’t view your success through the lens of an outlier. Things, people, and places are outliers for a reason. They are one of few. To expect everything to be an outlier would be to expect to buck the trend of humanity. Sometimes we need to expect 25%, or much less, of what we do to be successful and the majority of the time, or 75% of the time, we should expect things to fail. It is normal and it is humane.
Lean into this discomfort of failing. The discomfort of the slow grind. The discomfort of not knowing if what you create will be successful. There is something to be said of the slow grind too. The slow grind to the top is the only way. Getting rich quickly is an oxymoron. Anyone who was ever an overnight success had a Cinderella story that was built on nights, days, weeks, and years of slow, monotonous work.
The only way to ensure some of that work might resonate is to continue to create and publish things for the world to see. You have to increase your sample size. You have to shoot through the slump. You have to swing through the cold streak. Life rewards repetition, not lofty expectations and goals.
You never know when something may go viral or resonate with people but one thing you can do to increase your chances is to not quit and yes realize you will fail along the way. But to succeed, I have found plenty of failure comes with it. And perhaps the most ironic part of this piece might just be it could be a big failure as well, but I suppose that might just prove my point.
Appreciate you reading.
-Scantron
Love this - can't help but hear "the man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination" screaming at me through your words
“Lean into this discomfort of failing. The discomfort of the slow grind. The discomfort of not knowing if what you create will be successful.”
Hell yes. Discomfort is a symptom of growth sometimes.