At Alpha Game, Lee Jackson explains why the odds are seldom as bad as they appear mathematically:
My brother once applied for a job out-of-state.
There were over 250 applicants for the position. His odds were 1/250, mathematically speaking.
I talked to him on the phone when he decided to go through the application process. He said “Lee, people keep telling me I don’t have a chance because there are so many people trying to get this job.”
“Yeah, I imagine,” I said.
“But the thing is, I’m really not going against all those guys. I’m better than most of them already.”
Arrogant? No. It was objectively true.
When we were young, our dad and both of our grandads told us to “have a firm handshake,” “show up on time,” etc. The kind of basic stuff every man was supposed to know.
In Current Year, these things aren’t common among the uptalking soyboy set.
He makes a good point. For example, we often hear that “half of all marriages fail.” But does this mean that your marriage has a 50 percent of failure? Not at all. Because “all marriages” includes low-percentage marriages such as second and third marriages, interracial marriages, interreligious marriages, and marriages to women with 15+ sex partners.
I’ve never run the odds, but I would estimate that if you’re on a first marriage to a woman of the same race and religion with an average number of sex partners, your odds of marital success are probably on the order of 85 percent. And certainly, the anecdotal experience of all the married couples I know would tend to support that, as over the course of 20 years, not even one in ten of them have divorced.