Volume negates luck [#81]

I spent the past two weekends in small town in Southeastern Germany playing Lacrosse. 3 wins, 1 loss – all important games that led us to a 3rd place in the Czech Box Lacrosse League (NBLL). 

Here are the shot statistics from the last 3 games – can you guess which one we lost? (I play for VER Selb.)

That's right: we lost the game where we didn't have more shots than the opponent, 12-8 (and won the 4th quarter 3-0 because we started outshooting them).

Jizni Mesto had higher quality shots here, but we could’ve easily made up for the difference by simply shooting more on goal (we had 23 shots wide, the other team only 12). 

Accuracy helps. But more than anything, shooting more helps.

Because volume negates luck. 

When you do things with high volume, you tweak the statistics in your favor. You don't need a lucky shot to go in, you just take ten more.

And of course, this isn’t just true in sports.

It's also true in business & life. Let’s dive in. 🤿

On a recent podcast, Alex Hormozi told the following story (paraphrased): when he first started his gym, he figured he’d distribute flyers to acquire new customers.

A week later, he looked at the results. Not a single person had signed up for the gym from the flyers. 

So he calls his mentor: “hey, somehow this didn’t work out – what do you think?” 

“Well, how many flyers did you distribute?”

“300.” 

“300?! [mentor laughs] Man, you gotta do at least 5000 a day to have relevant numbers. A/B test, then continue to distribute the versions that do better.” 

Some people pay sales coaches thousands of euros for this kind of advice (you can get it here for free): when something’s not working, increase volume.

More of than not, doing 2, 5 or even 10 times as much is the answer. By increasing your volume, you also increase the amount of opportunities to get feedback, to learn, but also … the likelihood of closing something. 

Even if you just have a 1% conversion rate from cold call to discovery call, if you do 100 cold calls a day, you still book in one meeting per day.

That’s progress. 

And with that kind of volume, you will eventually get better. 

I had a similar experience at my company, Generalyst: when I was struggling with business, I did the unpleasant thing – and increased my outreach to companies 4x (from 5 to 20 outreaches per day).

It took some time to pay off, but now, I have 10+ positions to fill. It wasn’t pretty, I hated most of it, but it … simply works. 

Know someone who learns quickly, has a high degree of agency, and is a commercial jack-of-all-trades? Would love to get to know them. One of the 10+ positions I have open might just be for them.

Send them to this website.

Two more examples:

Language Learning:

People who attain fluency practice a lot more than the typical foreign language student.

“A lot” doesn’t mean 10% more, 25% more, or even 100% more. People who attain fluency practice about ten times as much as the typical person who is officially “learning a foreign language.”

That's why total immersion works so well: your volume goes from 15 minutes a day on Duolingo to 16 hours a day in real life.

Photography:

Quoting from James Clear's Atomic Habits (emphasis mine):

ON THE FIRST day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.

Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.

The same thing is true in all creative endeavors. My most popular posts are often the ones I put the least research and editing effort into.

Regardless of what it is that you want to improve, volume negates luck. You don’t need to be lucky to succeed if you constantly produce volume. 

So:

1. Pick one thing to improve this week
2. Do 2-10 times more of that thing that you normally do
3. See results or repeat step 2 until you see results 

"Shoot to get hot, shoot to stay hot."

That's it. Happy Monday.

LFG. 

One organizational note

I will be preparing for and then be at the European Lacrosse Championships in the next three weeks, so my writing schedule will be a bit disrupted.

I may or may not write newsletters, as I don’t know how much free time I’ll have between Lacrosse and doing the bare minimum for the business. 

Follow me on Instagram or TikTok instead where I’ll document the day-by-day of the life at Euros (while still attempting to run a business). 

PS: Utterly fantastic article by Packy McCormick about bringing back the magnificence of medieval Florence to the modern world. Long read, but worth it. 

PPS: Shoutout to Justus for constantly hammering this point home.

Whenever you're ready, there are four ways I can help you:

[1] Reclaim up to 4 hours per day and find time to do the things you've always wanted to do by enrolling into Personal Productivity OS.

[2] Hire your next Founder's Associate or other business generalist position with my startup, Generalyst Recruiting.

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