To Wit: An E-zine On How To Be a Wit
09/10/2007

This is an E-zine from Thomas Christopher on how to be witty.

The Law of Large Numbers

There is a way to practically guarantee success, as much success as you have time for. It is based on a statistical law known as the Law of Large Numbers. Speaking mathematically, the Law of Large Numbers says the mean of a sample approaches the mean of the population as the sample size increases. Loosely it says, fairly obviously, that if you do a lot of things that succeed one tenth of the time, on the average close to one in ten of them will work for you, and the more you do, the more certain it is that you will succeed that fraction of the time, and of course, the more successes you will have overall.

Salesmen know this. If they know that on the average one in ten calls produces a sale, one call has no guarantees. Ten calls may give a sale or two, or none. One hundred calls are pretty sure to give close to ten sales.

The Law of Large Numbers guarantees you success. Make enough attempts and you will have your successes. It also guarantees you failures. That’s okay. The only real question is, “Will the number of successes give you enough reward for your effort?”

There are several things you must consider in using the Law of Large Numbers to guarantee success.

First, you must do a lot of things. The sample size needs to be large. The Law of Large Numbers does not guarantee success on a single attempt.

Second, you must do reasonable things, things that have a high enough probability of success and high enough payout to justify their cost. Don't count on Powerball to pay the bills: over time you are guaranteed to lose money.

When you try applying the Law of Large Numbers, you will be faced with a choice: should you try many different kinds of activities, or should you specialize in one thing? Mixing your strategy protects against accidental futility: your estimates of the probability of success or the payout may be off. The situation may change. This is why you’re told to diversify your investment portfolio.

On the other hand, specializing in one thing increases your skill and improves your fraction of successes in that activity. Be careful though. These days, special knowledge can quickly become obsolete. And remember the definition attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Third, you must keep up your enthusiasm. As Sir Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

If your enthusiasm flags, two things will happen: 1) you will be likely to quit before the sample size, the number of things you attempt, gets large enough, and 2) you get discouraged and that makes the things you do less likely to succeed. You won’t put in the effort. Worse yet, as their probability of success goes down, you’ll need an increasing the number of attempts, which you are less likely to make. You will have fewer successes, which will make you even more discouraged.

Maintaining enthusiasm is hard. Evolution has provided us with a tendency to give up on activities that aren't working--it saves our energy. If you've calculated the probabilities of success and the payout, you can reason the effort will be worthwhile. Still, you are in the position of pitting reason against your biological programming. Alas, biological programming often wins.

Self talk can help. People keep repeating this quote from Winston Churchill: “Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” It is exactly what they need to hear.

Tom Hopkins, in his bestseller, How To Master the Art of Selling, gives five things you can say to yourself to get past failure. Choose whichever continuation of the sentence works best for you.

“I never see failure as failure, but only as...”

1. “a learning experience.”
2. “the negative feedback I need to change my course.”
3. “an opportunity to develop my sense of humor.”
4. “the opportunity to practice my techniques and perfect my performance.”
5. “the game I must play to win.”

Fourth, you must recognize successes. Successes do not often arise fully grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Often they come as infants, needing protection and nourishment to grow.

Edward de Bono, an expert on creative thinking, gives a number of techniques for breaking out of a fixed pattern of ideas. He defines success in a creative thinking session as simply “movement,” something new, something different. It does not require an entire new solution to a problem, since that hardly ever happens in the few minutes that can be devoted to a creative thinking session. He further noticed that groups he was leading through these sessions didn’t even notice what useful ideas they had come up with, so de Bono added “harvesting” to his set of important activities.

In these e-zines, we have looked at a number of techniques that can help you be witty. There are techniques for finding metaphors. There are techniques for constructing word play of several varieties. They don’t give you anything for much of what you try, a lot of what they do give you is dreck, but a certain number of results sparkle.

Sir Winston Churchill, in his history of World War II, remarked on the problems the British General Staff and the American Chiefs of Staff had working together. The deepest problem was a difference of attitude. The Americans wanted to plan each campaign to the minutest detail. The British thought that Jerry might not cooperate. The British preferred to do reasonable things and look for opportunities. Using the Law of Large Numbers is the British way. Do many reasonable things. Look for opportunities.

The Law of Large Numbers is a universal law that guarantees you success. It also guarantees you failures. Don't let the failures stop you: only the successes will end up on your resume.

Visit our web site at www.toolsofwit.com
To unsubscribe, send an e-mail request to tc-a@toolsofwit.com with the subject line: Unsubscribe.