The Success Equation. Michael J. Mauboussin

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      Wiseman collected a sample of hundreds of individuals and had them rate themselves on their beliefs about luck. He then sought to explain “the different ways in which lucky and unlucky people thought and behaved” and identified the “four principles of luck.” The principles include maximizing your chance opportunities, listening to your lucky hunches, expecting good fortune, and turning bad luck into good. Wiseman's research is unfailingly lively and provocative and he comes across as an energetic and intellectually curious man. Unfortunately, good science this is not.

      In one experiment, Wiseman asked people playing the U.K. National Lottery to submit a form that included information on how many tickets they intended to buy and whether they considered themselves lucky. Of the seven hundred–plus respondents, 34 percent considered themselves lucky, 26 percent unlucky, and 40 percent were neutral. Thirty-six of the respondents (about 5 percent) won money that night, split evenly between the lucky and unlucky people. Individuals lost £2.50 on average, just as you would expect according to the number of tickets purchased. Wiseman points out that this experiment shows that lucky people aren't psychic (just in case you thought they were); he also rules out any relationship between intelligence and luck.¹³ Suffice it to say that there is no way to improve your luck, because anything you do to improve a result can reasonably be considered skill.

      Skill

      Now let's turn to skill. The dictionary defines skill as the “ability to use one's knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance.”¹⁴ It's hard to discuss skill in a particular activity without recognizing the role of luck. Some activities allow little luck, such as running races and playing the violin or chess. In these cases, you acquire skill through deliberate practice of physical or cognitive tasks. Other activities incorporate a large dose of luck. Examples include poker and investing. In these cases, skill is best defined as a process of making decisions. So here's the distinction between activities in which luck plays a small role and activities in which luck plays a large role: when luck has little influence, a good process will always have a good outcome. When a measure of luck is involved, a good process will have a good outcome but only over time. When skill exerts the greater influence, cause and effect are intimately connected. When luck exerts the greater influence, cause and effect are only loosely linked in the short run.

      There's a quick and easy way to test whether an activity involves skill: ask whether you can lose on purpose. In games of skill, it's clear that you can lose intentionally, but when playing roulette or the lottery you can't lose on purpose. Advocates for the legalization of online poker in the United States articulated this neat test. The law considers poker as gambling, a game of luck, and ignores the role of skill. But while luck certainly does influence who wins at poker, there should be no doubt that it is also a game of skill.¹⁵

      Most people attain an acceptable level of skill in day-to-day activities after about fifty hours of training and practice. Examples include driving a car, learning to type, or playing a sport with basic proficiency. The process of acquiring a skill follows three stages:¹⁶

      As your learning passes through these phases, there is a change in the neural pathways that the brain employs. If you become skilled in a physical or cognitive task, your body knows what to do better than your mind, and thinking too much about what you're doing can actually lead to degradation in performance. In these activities, intuition is powerful and valuable.¹⁷

      Most of us hit a plateau in our skills and are perfectly content to stay there. Once at that plateau, additional experience does not lead to improved results (as my play in a recreational hockey league attests). What distinguishes elite performers, or experts, from the rest of us is that they advance beyond their natural plateaus through deliberate practice. Unlike routine and playful performance, deliberate practice pushes people to attempt what is beyond the limits of their performance. It involves hours of concentrated and dedicated repetition. Deliberate practice also requires timely and accurate feedback, usually from a coach or teacher, in order to detect and correct errors. Deliberate practice is laborious, time-consuming, and not much fun, which is why so few people become true experts or true champions.¹⁸

      In activities where luck plays a larger role, skill boils down to a process of making decisions. Unlike a piano virtuoso, who will perform at a high level every night, an investor or a businessperson who makes a good decision may suffer unwelcome consequences in the short term because of bad luck. Skill shines through only if there are a sufficient number of decisions to weed out bad luck.

      Jeffrey Ma was one of the leaders of a notorious team of blackjack players from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To make money, the team counted cards. Their system had two crucial components. First, team members fanned out and counted cards at a number of different tables in order to determine which tables were attractive. In this initial phase, the players stuck to small stakes. They were playing solely to determine if the cards that remained in the shoe had a relatively large number of high cards. The more high cards, the greater the chance that the player will win a hand. When a player found an attractive table, a teammate would join him and place large bets in order to win as much money as possible. As described in Ben Mezrich's best-selling book, Bringing Down the House, the team could express the attractiveness of the table and how large the bets should be with mathematical precision.¹⁹

      Ma and his team were acutely aware of the influence that luck could have and therefore stayed focused on their decision-making process. Indeed, Ma recounts an instance when he lost $100,000 in just two rounds over the course of ten minutes, even though he played his cards just right: “The quality of the decision can be evaluated by the logic and information I used in arriving at my decision. Over time, if one makes good, quality decisions, one will generally receive better outcomes, but it takes a large sample set to prove this.”²⁰ In other words, he has to place a lot of bets in order to win, because this game involves a lot of skill but it also involves a lot of luck.

      Developing skill is hard work whether or not luck is involved. But the feedback is very different, depending on the degree to which luck plays a role. With most physical tasks, there is a high correlation between skill and results. If you work diligently at increasing your speed at typing, the number of words you can type each minute will increase and the number of errors you make will decline. With tasks that depend on luck, making proper decisions using good skill can produce poor results over the short term. To use Ma's example, whether his team won or lost was not a reliable form of feedback in assessing skill unless and until they played enough games. The lack of quality feedback wreaks psychological havoc, too, creating false doubt in skillful people who are making good decisions and creating false confidence in those who are doing well simply because they're experiencing a streak of good luck.

      In considering skill, it is also important to distinguish between experience and expertise. There is an unspoken assumption that someone doing something for a long time is an expert. In activities that depend largely on skill, though, expertise comes only through deliberate practice, and very few individuals are willing to commit the time and effort to go beyond a plateau of performance that's good enough. The fact is, most of us generally don't need performance СКАЧАТЬ