On very rare occasions, someone has the guts to ask me what my basic philosophy on life is. My exact answers vary from instance to instance and from person to person but all of those answers play upon the same theme. Sometimes I’ll say, “I want to be RELENTLESS!” Because I say that with so much fury (I have been known to throw spit around when I get especially worked up about something), people tend to get scared off and don’t want to contemplate the matter, at least not in my presence, much further.
My purpose here is to establish why I’m not crazy and why it makes good sense to be a relentless person; a person who doesn’t quit, even in the face of bad odds, judgmental bastards, and whatever other obstacles are in the way.
Let’s say one day you wake up and you get an idea in your head. Maybe you’ve been watching too many YouTube videos on fishing at your boring office job and you really want to catch a rare ocean fish. You get “inspired.”
Now, maybe because you’re a damn newbie at this ocean fishing game, everything that could go wrong on this newly inspired fishing expedition does go wrong. You forget to take into consideration that there's a powerful Gulf current and your little two horsepower outboard motor has you sputtering in the opposite direction of where you want to go so you can't try to fish in the spot you wanted without being unintentionally swept off to Cuba. The sea swells are sending you up and down so you hook your own thumb, not too badly but bad enough to cause some bleeding, instead of your bait. You bring the wrong bait because you don't understand your prey's eating habits so you might as well be throwing salad leaves at Bengal tigers. You haven't acquired your sea legs yet so you fall down in your little slippery bottomed dingy, scrape your elbow, and puke on the floor from sea sickness. You're not used to being in the hot sun so you feel like you've acquired a fever. You don't bring enough water so you get parched and that contributes to your frustration as you sit there thinking about how stupid your new fishing goal is. Worse than not even catching the fish you wanted, you don't catch any fish at all! So after two hours of this fishing "nonsense" you swear at yourself and decide to quit, putter back to shore, beach your boat, grab your gear and drive home.
Now, in my mind, you are either one of two people when it comes to handling the outcome of your unsuccessful fishing trip. You can be the type of person who will whine at work to your friends the next day that the ocean is a bad tempered mistress, that the fish weren’t biting yesterday, that the old fisherman’s advice was bad, that the weather didn’t cooperate, and that your life just isn’t panning out the way you wanted it to. You are a quitter. A loser. A whiner. You will go fishing one time, come back with nothing, and conclude that fishing is just not for you. Then you’ll move on to the next thing and the same tired old story will play itself out in that endeavor. You won’t see success there because you’ll quit after the first few tries at that. The cycle will continue. You will live your whole life this way, bouncing from one thing to another, never quite figuring out why you can’t enjoy anything.
But maybe, just maybe, you’re another type of person. Maybe, after your unsuccessful trip, you vow to analyze your mistakes, draw the correct lessons from them, and try again tomorrow and for as many days as you need to until you catch that once in a lifetime bastard of a fish. When you make this decision and start to talk about it the little people will start to protest:
The little people protest because they're not open minded enough to learn anything about odds. Let's say, on any particular fishing trip, that the chances of catching this really rare ocean fish, let's call him "silver-gill", is only 1%. Each fishing trip, therefore, has a probability of success of 1%. So if you try to catch Mr. Silver-gill but only make one attempt, unless you are very lucky, which you aren't, and you shouldn't rely on luck anyways, you won't catch him. But if you are a relentless type of person, the odds begin to swing in your favor. The process of repeated trials where the outcome of one trail does not affect the outcome of another is called a Bernoulli process. Going out onto the water to catch silver-gill is a Bernoulli process. There's an equation for that, it's this:
$1-(nxx0.01xx0.99^(n-1))$, where $n$ is the number of fishing trips.
Now, if you're skeptical of that, you need to do some of your own investigation to determine if I'm telling the truth as far as the math goes. I'd advise you buy this book, stop complaining and get reading/scribbling. And yes I really am telling you to go buy a $200 book so that you can start sharpening and polishing that dull and pock marked to hell blade that you call your mind.
So if you fished for 20 days in a year, your chances of catching silver-gill at least once go up according to the equation. Let's plug in our numbers:
$1-(20xx0.01xx0.99^(19)) ~~ 0.83 = 83%$
Damn, ok, we might have good reason to have hope that we'll catch silver-gill after all. What if we fished for a year? What's our chance of success then? Well,
$1-(365xx0.01xx0.99^(364)) ~~ 0.91 = 91%$
What if we fished for ten years?
$1-(3650xx0.01xx0.99^(3649)) ~~ 0.99 = 99%$
But beyond catching the dream fish and snapping that wonderful photo of you with him that you plan to show off to ladies at the bar, you might learn some things about yourself along the way. You might get tan and lean. You might start wearing a straw hat to fight the sun. You might get little hits of pleasure every time you hear the water slapping against the hull of your dingy. You might stop caring if you look like a hobo to tourists on the beach in your knee-cut jeans because you've started bringing home tasty fish that you can make into tasty meals. You might start to like the art of flaying, storing, and cooking the food that you've caught. You might learn to enjoy the feeling of plunging your baking body into cool water and the shock that sends through your nerves. Maybe you'll even take a swim in the middle of the ocean with no life jacket on and no tether to your dingy on a calm day. Maybe you'll catch a big fish and you'll have to beat his head in with a mallet so he stops trying to leap out of your boat or bite you with his sharp predatory teeth or cut you with his sharp fins. Maybe you'll start getting good at telling stories and spinning tales of your fishing adventures. Maybe you'll learn to smile and swell with pride when people whisper that you're a crazy and dangerous man.
Maybe...
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