Damyon Runyon once said life is a six-to-five proposition - against. According to the World Health Organization’s latest study that reports that half the world’s population doesn’t reach the age of 40, Runyon’s betting line appears pretty accurate.
Indeed, we are lucky. So what are you going to do, press your luck? Damon Runyon wouldn’t. Percentages are the universe’s way of keeping order. That’s why we have the normal curve or Bell Curve, a statistic that says of a random sampling of 100 people 60 percent will be average in height, weight, and intelligence while 20 percent will be below and 20 percent will above. Put another way. You and I have a 60 percent chance of being like the next guy or average.
Percentages are guided by the law of averages: Flip a coin ten times and it should result in five heads and five tails. Casinos operate and prosper by the law of averages. They figure what the break-even percentage is in a game and give themselves small “edge.” Such slight favor in percentage allows them to grind out a profit at the end of the day.
Once I was playing golf with a friend in Florida. On the first nine I sliced four shots into the pine woods, and as if by magic, the balls ricocheted off a tree to land safely back into the fairway. My friend, who was losing a small wager, called off the bet on the back nine, intimidated by my good fortune. Too bad for him, the odds were in his favor. Sure enough, I sliced four shots into the woods on the back nine and never saw the balls again. As far I know they could have sailed into another area code. Once again, order is restored to the universe. Somewhere in the universe it is written that no one shall have an unfair advantage over another. That is the law of average, the great equalizer. Take a cue. Never fight the percentages. If you play the ups and downs of the stock market every day, unless you know something, the best you can do is break even – but that’s only if you’re not paying commissions. Like the wise man said, you’re gambling if you don’t have the odds with you, and gamblers usually end up with a case of the “shorts”.
For me there seems to be a psychological corollary operating in all this. Winning at gambling or the stock market is no guarantee for happiness or contentment. Recognizing that, I have come to believe that the law of average is more than an immutable statistic, it is an existential principal that when learned protects fools like me from themselves.
Once I went on an incredible run at a casino. The money I won exhilarated me. There may have been more esteemed people than me in the place, but no one thumped their chest more loudly than me. But, the instant high and sense of well being with which I was flushed from winning was temporary and could not be sustained unless I won more. Thus, I gambled more. However, given what we know of the odds against winning, it was certain that if I kept playing I would eventually lose money and not be able to sustain my sense of well being. But, to many people as with myself, my sense of well being had become associated with and supplanted by winning and instant gratification instead of the traditional means of work and accomplishment. The hard wiring in my brain that regulates my well being had been short-circuited to respond to the stimuli of gambling and it seductive rewards of instant gratification. Why work and earn a sense of well being when you believe you can get it with the roll of the dice and the spike of stock price? Or, if you aren’t playing the stock market or visiting the casino, there is the lottery that teases our collective conscious with the “gold at the end of the rainbow” which we believe, if won, will somehow exempt us from all our problems.
Thus, the law of averages is a safeguard from those grandiose feelings ever being anything more than just an illusion. To me understanding those dynamics answer the psychologists’ dilemma over what comes first, accomplishments or self esteem.
If I want to live a truly satisfactory and rewarding life it will have to be earned the old fashion way through a work ethic that provides for accomplishments. Work and assuming responsibility for oneself are the only percentages worth playing.
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