The 40-30-30 Rule: Why Risk Is Worth It | Hacker News Reader

The 40-30-30 Rule: Why Risk Is Worth It

the99percent.com

51 pointswgj16 comments

As somebody that does alpine skiing and is a great fan of the sport, I feel I should elaborate on that analogy. You see the coach was talking about practice. And yes in practice you should be pushing yourself and risking a fall.

There is a tradeoff between speed and risk in slalom. The faster you go the more likely it is to fall or miss a gate. But skill goes into it too. A more skilled skier will be able to go faster without making any mistakes. And how do you get skills? Well you practice. That's why you should practice at speeds that tend to cause you to fall. Because as you keep falling your skills at that speed increase and eventually you will fall less and less until you stop falling and you are able to ski reliably at the higher speed. If you practice at comfortable speeds, you will not gain the skills to deal with higher speeds. But all of this is true because it is training and in training the cost of a fall is more or less nothing (again we are talking about slalom here, not downhill where one fall can easily kill you).

Of course when you start racing things get different. One fall or missed gate usually disqualifies you from a race. Also, a single race includes two runs down the hill. Thus, one could race brilliantly for most of the day and fall in the end of the second run and become disqualified. A world cup run involves many races around the world, wherein each skiier earns points for each race and the points are added up in the end of the year to determine the gold medalist.

So an elite skier can afford to ski relatively safe in order to get consistent results over the many races. What you actually see in slalom is that many of the top skiers do not ski as fast as they are capable during the year. They want to control their risk. It is the younger and less known skiers that try to ski as fast as they can, because they figure if they play it safe they will probably finish behind the experienced guys, but if they risk it all they might get first place and make a name for themselves.

So the lesson of embracing risk works only during practice and not always during the race.

What life or business lessons one can gain from this? I don't know I just felt like talking about skiing. But hey I have one, maybe if you are a startup founder you should be like a young and inexperienced skiier and risk it all, because if you play it safe you will always get beaten by a big company playing it safe.

I would add to this that it's important to view optimism and pessimism in the face of risk as a conscious choice. Which view you take is your strategy for acting in the face of that risk.

The research presented in the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman more or less tells us that people who make this choice consciously have the highest rates of success in life.

The rule, then, is if the consequence of taking the risk and failing is dire, you should be pessimistic, otherwise, always be optimistic. That is, if failing would be catastrophic or really bad, believe that the worst will happen and act accordingly. If the consequence of failure is trivial or not a problem, believe that the best will happen and act accordingly.

Expressing the percentages this way is misleading, because it leads people to believe that they should allocate their time proportionately to the different factors that lead to success. This is pretty ridiculous on it's face, but I'd say >90% of athletes and coaches believe it, even on the professional level.

While strictly speaking we could probably do more to educate people about this fallacy, it would probably just be easier to express the same idea with respect to time. That is, figure out how you should be spending each day to maximize success, and then go from there.

Let's say you train 3 hours a day. Of that, maybe 90 minutes should be cardio, 60 minutes should be strength, and 30 minutes should be devoted to pushing oneself. And while these high intensity pieces are mostly designed to make one mentally tougher, they also make one physically stronger as well. So therefore, we get that ~10% of success is mental.

The good thing about expressing the problem this way is that it leads people to measure what they do and optimize their training according to what's empirically happening to their bodies and performance, rather than arbitrarily choosing some system and ignoring all feedback.

Misleads who exactly? There are many things to which we ascribe ratios that have nothing to do with time. For instance, people say poker is 80% skill and 20% luck (more for tournament poker, less for limit ring games). Does that mean we should spend 20% of our time rubbing rabbit's feet? Not to anyone who has spent anytime playing poker.

I have been involved in sports at a fairly high level, and to assume that 90% of athletes (or other professionals) apportion time based based on non-concrete goals is, frankly, naive. First a non sport related example: Let's assume we have a Rails programmer who really wants to gain experience with Scala. I would contend there about 0% chance he sits down and says I want to spend 30% of my time learning Scala and then starts reading books. A more realistic scenario would likely revolve around picking a project and spending time completing that project, a concrete goal. The same holds true for a professional baseball player. When he goes out and takes hitting practice, it is not just to hit better, it is to improve his swing motion or change his mechanics, or mess with his footwork, all concrete goals. Yes, he wants to improve his swing, but there is no way he goes out there and says I want to spend 30% of my time improving my swing, he thinks, today I will work on my stance and tomorrow I will work on my grip etc. Sorry if this is belaboring the point, but I think it nonsensical to assume that high-level professionals anywhere do this kind of rationing.

That's not say that we should do away with non-concrete goals altogether. They are important drivers and having some indefinite goal for the future is a good mechanism to drive us to do the smaller things. That said, it is my experience that we partition time for concrete things (heavy bag work, jump rope, complete newest incarnation of website frontend, practice mozart on piano, etc etc.) more efficiently, and most importantly way more often.

The percentages look like a standard gimmick to make the article more readable and create an attention-getting headline. The message is still valid though.

The percentages are probably a rhetorical tool: "success is 30% risk taking? That means that if I don't take risks in life, even with perfect ability and technique I can only accomplish 70%! That's a C-!"

Favorite bit from the article: If you're not falling at least once per day, you're not trying hard enough.

There's a saying in football that's more funny but the point is the same: If you're not cheating, you're not trying.

If everything seems under control then you aren't going fast enough - Mario Andretti

{ If you’ve never hit the ground while skydiving, you’re opening your parachute too early.

If you’ve never gotten food poisoning, you haven’t been eating interesting enough food.

If you’ve never gotten a speeding ticket, you’re driving too slow. } - Ari

To wit: Maximize your expected return.

Is hitting the ground while skydiving ever survivable?

Ordinarily.

Some risk is good but too much risk is just plain stupid. You have to gauge the situation and make a calculated guess. Take software development for example. Going dark (i.e. without customer feedback see http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/news/?p=61 ) risks your application's relevance but it is necessary or you will never get any coding done.

well, my coach told me while pointing to some "optimistic risk taker" like this with such mental self-confidence:

- Regardez, ce qu'il fait, c'est très dangereux, il ne maitrise pas du tout ce qu'il fait: il fait ce qu'il peut, et non pas ce qu'il veut. Il va finir se casser, ce n'est pas comme ça qu'il faut faire...

...and the real trouble is, is that he puts others on the slope into danger as well.

Would you please translate it? I don't want to translate via google as it would certainly miss something.

- Look at him, what he's doing, it's very dangerous, he isn't in control of what he's doing at all: he's doing what he can, not what he wants. He'll end up broken (), that's not how one's supposed to do...

() probable missing word here

Thanks!

This article came at a perfect time for me. Thanks!

Edit: Nothing in it is anything especially new it just reminded me of a simple fact.

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