Appreciating the stochastic nature of life, failures and success

I think it would be good if people realized how random the world is (at least, it seems random to me =) ).

Imagine if all the things you ever did in life could be plotted as a normal distribution. Failures would then be considered as only data points on the curve. Instead of being overly concerned with a single data point, we would  be more interested in the overall shape of the curve.

There are 2 properties that characterize the shape of the normal distribution, the mean μ and variance σ². Hence, we would start asking ourselves different questions. Are our attempts leading us closer to the mean? Are we increasing the peak of our mean? How many standard deviations are our attempts away from the mean?

We would accept that life is inherently random, and that there is always a slight possibility of failure, regardless of how much we prepare ourselves. We would not put so much pressure on ourselves to always get it right or to always succeed on every attempt. Moreover, we would understand that trying and failing is just merely part of a process of trying and failing enough times, while trying to move closer to our peak and improving our peak.

We would not sweat the small stuff. Instead, we would keep a close look at how the middle part of our curve looks like (the bulk of the curve within 3 standard deviations).

What would be the value as measured by the vertical axis? Would it be money? Happiness? "Quality" (as defined by Robert Persig)? Would there be more than 1 dimension measured? It would be difficult and pointless to compare.

We could rank the activities that we do daily and start dropping all those activities that are not worthwhile.

Similarly, we could plot the relationships that we have and focus on the ones that make us happy.

If we were to compare between the curves of our friends and our own, we would realize that there would be a large overlap. The large overlap enables us to relate to each other and the differences make us interesting to each other.

10,000 experiments to find the material for a light bulb. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert. 10,000 attempts for a good approximation to a life's worth of normal distribution =)