I randomly stumbled upon Tim Minchin graduation talk from a decade ago. There are many (well, nine) points in the talk, but the one that triggered me to write this was it’s all luck.

Life is full of wicked problems. A problem is wicked when it’s not solvable in the mathematical sense of the word: requirements are contradicting, solutions aren’t repeatable even in slightly different contexts, and the problem changes as you’re solving it.

It sounds terrifying, right? Reality is that the vast majority of life decisions are addressing wicked problems: selecting your school, your partner (in business or life), deciding where to live, what kind of career to pursue.

Similarly at work, we frequently deal with wicked problems: from which features to build and what kind of marketing campaign to push, to what architectural pattern to apply to a software problem. A common theme with wicked problems is that the effects of these decisions typically lag months or years making it very hard to get a clear understanding of cause and effect.

Reality we live in is complex and volatile (and probably getting more volatile due to globalization and technology, but more on that some other time). We all need predictable and reproducible models to deal with this world. Hence all the books and frameworks on how to raise kids and how to build great products and companies.

All these books and frameworks suffer from survivor bias. This reminds me of the story about a national coin-flipping contest Warren Buffet wrote about 40 years ago: if 300 million people start flipping coins, after 20 rounds there will be 200 people who got heads 20 times in a row. At least some of them will start writing books about their coin flipping techniques.

There are many examples to pick, but I’ll focus on two that are fairly prominent and popular in the tech circles:

• Eric Ries (of Lean startup fame) was much more successful as a book author and Silicon Valley influencer than as a founder. Lean startup likely has far more readers than IMVU has MAUs 🙂
• Marty Cagan (of Silicon Valley Product Group fame) is a successful tech executive with a long career in the industry, but judging by his Linkedin hasn’t started a globally successful product company.

Most of these books (and the two quoted above especially) are full of useful ideas and frameworks. I use them on a weekly basis. But reality is messy. Data from experiments is rarely so clear-cut to make product decisions easy. A/B tests only measure first order effects. The predominant factor appears to be luck after all — being at the right place in the right time, with the right proposition.

In that world, the main thing we can do is to make it easier for luck to find us — increase optionality by making asymmetric bets as often as we can. Eventually you do get lucky. And I fully appreciate the irony of a guy working for a gambling company preaching you luck.