Success Is a Numbers Game — Nothing More

I didn't learn about success from a textbook — I learned it from experience. From college and scholarship applications, to job rejections, to reaching out to investors, I began to see a pattern: success isn't magic, it's mathematics.

My dad used to tell me, "You just need one yes." At first, it sounded like encouragement. Later, I realized it was probability. If the chance of success is 0.0001, and you try 10,000 times, you're guaranteed a win. The problem is, no one knows where the stopping line is. That uncertainty — not failure itself — is what makes people quit.

I think about it like the 3-mile races I used to run back home in Zimbabwe. We didn't have watches or distance markers. We just ran. You never knew how far you'd gone or how much was left. The exhaustion wasn't just physical — it was mental. That's what life feels like: running toward a finish line you can't see. Some people get there after three tries. Others after a hundred. Some after a thousand. But everyone's race is different.

Even the confident and gifted face the same math. Cold-approaching a girl? The success rate is about 25%, even for the handsome ones. The difference isn't charm — it's volume and resilience. Thomas Edison tried over a thousand times before perfecting the light bulb. Each "failure" wasn't wasted effort; it was data. Machine learning algorithms work the same way — not by guessing right the first time, but by iterating through millions of examples until accuracy emerges. Progress — human or artificial — is built on repetition and refinement.

As the saying goes, "If you hang around a barbershop long enough, sooner or later you'll get a haircut." Stay close to opportunity long enough, and probability will eventually reward you.

Success, in the end, is not a mystery — it's statistical persistence. You don't have to be the smartest or the luckiest. You just have to keep showing up. Because the game isn't about knowing when you'll win — it's about never leaving the table before you do.