This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

If the weather report says that there’s an 80% chance of sunshine on Saturday, your wedding day, does that mean it won’t rain? One way to look at a prediction of 80% sunshine is that it’s a tug of war between eight people pulling for the sun and only two people pulling for rain. Of course the sun is going to win. That’s not what’s happening. It also doesn’t mean that there’s a 100% chance it will rain 80% of the day this Saturday. If the meteorologists have done their job well, what they’re saying is that for every 100 Saturdays like this one, in this location, it’s quite likely that it will rain on 20 of them. Here’s a deck with five cards in it, one ace and four Jokers. Pick a card at random. The ace means it’s raining. Some people call this probability, which is a five-syllable way of hiding a simple idea. Probability is nothing but a report on how the deck is stacked. If we are going to choose our future, it helps to have a hint about what to expect there.