Your Kids Have 0.00002% Chance To Succeed
July 13, 2015 - after a decade-long, three-billion mile journey through the solar system, the mission was finally complete. NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft had finally reached its destination, Pluto, in what seemed like an uncertain voyage.
Or was it uncertain?
NASA predicted that New Horizons would have a 99.99998% chance of success.
Pluto's receding crescent from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, taken when the spacecraft was 120,000 miles (200,000 kilometers) away from Pluto. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)
A lot of other things demand such pinpoint accuracies.
Businesses’ 5-year, 10-year plans. Complex medical procedures. Multibillion-dollar investments. When much is at stake, humans demand a level of certainty before taking a step forward.
Imagine a life where you can have 99.99998% certainty before making any decision.
Whether the burger will taste delicious. Whether there will be any career progression in your current job. Whether this school will be the right one for your kids. Unknowingly, we’re all statisticians on a journey to calculate the best probabilities in life.
But in the last three years, life has taught us that the minuscule probabilities - the 0.00002% - could be a lot more consequential than we think.
Normal Isn’t Normal Anymore.
“What should we do when faced with a virus that [is] incompatible with our economic model?”, writes Enrique Dans in his 2020 article The Pandemic Really Has Changed The World Forever.
“Given that the virus won’t change its habits, and that any vaccine we are able to come up with won’t be a magic bullet, the only alternative is to change our economic model. Change our way of life. Start thinking that many of the things we did before March of this year are gone for the foreseeable”
When I read Dans’ words, I reckoned he wasn’t referring to the need for society to adapt to a new way of life.
Instead, society needed a fundamental shift in our thinking towards leading a normal life. Time wasn’t on our side. We needed to get used to it fast, whether we like it or not, or get left behind.
If there’s one word that we need to remove from your child’s mental dictionary, is the word normal. And the word that we need to spotlight - change.
Think about it.
When was the last time humans had to go through a momentous shift in our lives comparable to the pandemic? Humanity was greeted with a big surprise as we ushered ourselves into the new decade. We witnessed firsthand our smallness in the grand scheme of things as the unexpected exemplified it’s power.
“Cities, restaurants, public spaces, travel, prisons, supply chains, health care, trade, education, work, communication… an enormous change that, obviously, the vast majority of the population has yet to imagine.”
Covid-19 today. What’s next?
I gathered we will have to redefine the word normal more frequently than we’d imagined in our lifetime.
Go Back To The Straight Line
Humans are creatures of habit and purveyors of assurance. You’re wired to seek certainty in all aspects of life. You crave the solace of knowing you’ve made the right decision.
Your kids are prime examples.
You want the best for them. Mapping out their future year-by-year, you find yourself meticulously planning for what’s ahead. Get into a good school, ace those examinations and land yourself a high paying job.
But there’s still that 0.00002%, no matter how small, bugging us at the back of our minds. Like a tiny stone stuck in our shoe.
“The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces,” Robert Greene writes. “It requires a conscious effort to fight against the weakness of the human mind to strive for certainty.
If there’s one thing I recalled from high school Geography class, is river formation.
Have you observed how a river twists and turns like a snake? Meanders happen because water flows in different ways. Sometimes, the water moves faster on one side and slower on the other. Stronger waters grind against the riverbanks, shaping them into a C curve.
The thing about meanders is they always return to a straight flow, but this time, on a new trajectory.
Meander formation. From straight to curve to c section. The cycle repeats.
Over a period of time, extreme bends are cut off from the main river body.
Gradually transforming into a bend, natural forces cuts off the excess. What’s left is a C-section that was once part of the main body. Begin as a straight course, goes through a period of modification, and return to a straight course. Now the bearing has shifted, and the endpoint has been redefined.
A simple cycle of nature.
Where are your kids in this loop? Are they leaving behind the once meaningful but now irrelevant portion of their lives to focus on creating a new course? Are they exercising their creativity to expound on their past experiences to create a new flow? Or are they just hoping to bend as many times as they can?
The more C-sections you leave behind, the greater your life experiences will be.
The Short of It?
Remind yourself and your children to pursue life with the 0.00002% mentality. Treat everything as if it were a meander where change is the only constant. Pursuing certainty is an illusion, and becoming adaptable isn’t an option anymore.
Life may throw all the bends and curves at your kids, but teach them to ride a straight line with a mind of a explorer. Get ready for a change in direction and maybe, they might just reach Pluto.
Be well,
Miss G (@gladyssoh)
