For fans of Atomic Habits and Malcolm Gladwell: a revolutionary framework that empowers you to transform yourself from someone who could succeed, into someone who mathematically should succeed utilizing a “goal hacking” methodology to increase your odds of success.
We live in a culture that is obsessed with optimizing for productivity. If you want to have a successful career, we’ve been told, you need to do more in less time, right? Wrong. Kyle Young is the marketing mastermind behind best-selling authors (like Jeff Goins and Gary Taubes), tech-startup founders, real estate moguls, and award-winning psychologists. He spent years analyzing how these A-list clients achieved their biggest goals. Productivity, and even grit or the 10,000 hour rule, he says are the wrong approaches for pursuing big goals. The secret flywheel he discovered? Focus on the upshot, or outcome, by learning how to “hack” the odds in your favor.
Outcomes are the product of a fundamental relationship between two important numbers: a person’s odds of success and the number of times they try. In SUCCESS IS A NUMBERS GAME, Kyle busts conventional myths about the odds of success, distilling his “goal hacking” framework for stacking the odds by deconstructing goals into “key events.” Kyle says our unique habits and attributes impact our specific outcomes—and adjusting those levers is the key.
In Part 1: The Surprising Truth About Your Odds of Success, he busts myths about odds we’ve heard, like “1 in 10 businesses fail,” or “14% of job applicants get the job.” But these are simple, generic odds. Goals are compound events. In fact, ambitious goals are complex, long-term projects, with many micro elements that influence the outcome—events, relationships, decisions, and external factors, all of which can be manipulated with odds. In Part 2: Maximize Your Chances of Achieving Big Goals, we learn how to set up “automatic advantages,” how to effectively adjust our decision-making and relationships based on chance. In Part 3: Play Defense with a Gambler’s Mind, readers are empowered to fend off obstacles, learn “the rule of 60%” to avoid giving up, and how to reduce the chances of derailing events.
SUCCESS IS A NUMBERS GAME will offer a clear, practical answer to the challenge of how to accomplish your biggest goals when the odds feel stacked against you. Because, as Kyle says, the greatest success stories in history, analyzed correctly, offer us a framework that acknowledges the reality of disparity, the necessity of failure, and the very real opportunity for success.
